“So I told her that I loved her, not for telling me the thing she had told me, but for the courage involved in telling something like it, something that sad.”

“sometimes there is too much irony all piled up in the barn, and you have to / pitchfork another steaming pile of irony on top of it all, and you have to / pitchfork another, and another, and another / when the world is shit-streaked with irony that is when beauty will emerge / love is irony / purists sure hate farce / but pushing against things is the only possible way to live”

“Writing is beautiful, like putting on a gold suit and going to sleep in it.”

“She stood beside me for years, or was it a moment? I cannot remember. Maybe I loved her, maybe I didn't. There was a house, and then no house. There were trees, but none remain. When no one remembers, what is there? You, whose moments are gone, who drift like smoke in the afterlife, tell me something, tell me anything.”

“And I understand my sisters when they say every woman has a story that's been told a maxim of one soul, maybe lessAnd that is why you'll never hear me call a woman slut, bitch or a dyke,No matter what she does, because I do not blame herI blame the men who have emotionally and physically raped her,I blame these corporations whose images tell them they hate her,And I put my arms on her shoulder and tell her how great to life and to God that SHE created her”

“I like a good story well told. That is the reason I am sometimes forced to tell them myself.”

“I wondered whether Mrs. Shears had told the police that I had killed Wellington and whether, when the police found out that she had lied, she would go to prison. Because telling lies about people is called slander.”