“Cold sinks in, there to stay. And people, they'll leave you, sure. There's no return to what was and no way back. There's just emptiness all around, and you in it, like singing up from the bottom of a well, like nothing else, until you harm yourself, until you are a mad dog biting yourself for sympathy. Because there is no relenting.”

“And when it happens that you are broken, or betrayed, or left, or hurt, or death brushes near, let yourself sit by an apple tree and listen to the apples falling all around you in heaps, wasting their sweetness. Tell yourself that you tasted as many as you could.”

“Can you stop your mother from singing to you? Who would do such a thing?”

“Leave the dishes.Let the celery rot in the bottom drawer of the refrigeratorand an earthen scum harden on the kitchen floor.Leave the black crumbs in the bottom of the toaster.Throw the cracked bowl out and don't patch the cup.Don't patch anything. Don't mend. Buy safety pins.Don't even sew on a button.Let the wind have its way, then the earththat invades as dust and then the deadfoaming up in gray rolls underneath the couch.Talk to them. Tell them they are welcome.Don't keep all the pieces of the puzzlesor the doll's tiny shoes in pairs, don't worrywho uses whose toothbrush or if anythingmatches, at all.Except one word to another. Or a thought.Pursue the authentic-decide firstwhat is authentic,then go after it with all your heart.Your heart, that placeyou don't even think of cleaning out.That closet stuffed with savage mementos.Don't sort the paper clips from screws from saved baby teethor worry if we're all eating cereal for dinneragain. Don't answer the telephone, ever,or weep over anything at all that breaks.Pink molds will grow within those sealed cartonsin the refrigerator. Accept new forms of lifeand talk to the deadwho drift in though the screened windows, who collectpatiently on the tops of food jars and books.Recycle the mail, don't read it, don't read anythingexcept what destroysthe insulation between yourself and your experienceor what pulls down or what strikes at or what shattersthis ruse you call necessity.”

“When we are young, the words are scattered all around us. As they are assembled by experience, so also are we, sentence by sentence, until the story takes shape.”

“i want to hear what's happened to you," she said evenly after a while. she gestured in the direction, down river, of the butcher shop. "it's just that there is nowhere else to start," she said gently. "niether of us is the same. but i'm different because of small, good, manageable things. you're different because ... things i don't know.”

“Life will break you. Nobody can protect you from that, and living alone won’t either, for solitude will also break you with its yearning. You have to love. You have to feel. It is the reason you are here on earth. You are here to risk your heart. You are here to be swallowed up.”