“Some things must happen so that others may come to pass.”

“Do what you know needs to be done.”

“To an engineer, good enough means perfect. With an artist, there's no such thing as perfect.”

“Awakened by a thousand dogs, a passing truck, the tailspin of a poisoned mosquito (or, perhaps, merely the silence of my dreams), I had, before remembering who and where I was, seen only that green sun suspended in the firmament of my room (her uterus bottled in preserving fluids) and, through seconds that became millennia, millennia aeons, felt the steadfastness of my orbit around that cold glow of love, a marvelous fatal steadfastness, before my pupils dilated and shadows and unease once more defined reality, the steel box naked but for a mattress and insomnious bugs where I had lived, in a coma of heartbreak and drunkenness, the six months since Primavera's death.”

“Today the city melted in a heat wave. The crystal skyscrapers glittered like knives (this is a city of knives), steel-and-glass blades inlaid with the reflections of other knives, mirrors within mirrors within mirrors, knives that thrust up at the scorched clouds, presaging that evening's little death… As always, beneath the vaulted brilliance the infernal shadows of the streets were filled with the phantoms of murdered girls.”

“Our life is a blank book and we are the authors......... Write and shape your story as much as the mind can imagine it”

“No, she answered, “one is of tin, and one of straw; one is a girl and another a Lion. None of them is fit to work, so you may tear them into small pieces.”