“Tell Allen I plead guilty to vampirism and other crimes against life. But I love him and nothing else cancels love.”

“They say only love can create, so who the fuck could love up a centipede? He's got more love in him than I got.Now, killing a centipede makes me feel safer - like, one less.”

“For the last four years of her life, Mother was in a nursing home called Chateins in St. Louis ... [S]ix months before she died I sent a Mother's Day card. There was a horrible, mushy poem in it. I remember feeling "vaguely guilty.”

“Human, Allen, is an adjective, and its use as a noun is in itself regrettable.”

“So he is putting down junk and coming on with tea. I take three drags, Jane looked at him and her flesh crystallized. I leaped up screaming "I got the fear!" and ran out of the house. Drank a beer in a little restaurant - mosaic bar and soccer scores and bullfight posters - and waited for the bus to town.A year later in Tangier I heard she was dead.”

“Love is a haunting melody that I have never mastered, and I fear I never will.”

“The people in power will not disappear voluntarily, giving flowers to the cops just isn't going to work. This thinking is fostered by the establishment; they like nothing better than love and nonviolence. The only way I like to see cops given flowers is in a flower pot from a high window.”