"I vividly remember watching women in films when I was nine or 10, picturing them being what I'd be like as an adult. I had these real female crushes on certain actresses. And I'd watch them, thinking, 'One day, I'll be that. One day I'll be a woman.'."

"You will meet people in life who will just dislike you for no reason, not because there is anything wrong with you but because everything is going right for you. Until they master their own peace, they will always try to destroy yours."

"There was no protection, no quota system when it came to luck. It was like that moment in math when a child learns that the odds of heads or tails is always one-in-two, no matter how many times one has flipped the coin and gotten heads. Every flip, the odds are the same. Every day, you could be unlucky all over again."

"A phase of my life was closing to-night, anew one opening to-morrow: impossible to slumber in the interval; I must watch feverishly while the change was beingaccomplished."

"Somehow however just knowing that I could fully expect unhappiness to return – if not predictably then nevertheless reliably – was strangely liberating. The point was that even chaos had a structure a beginning and eventually an end. It was possible to live through it. I’d been doing as much for twenty years."

"His yellow eyes were half-lidded as he sang, and in that golden moment, hanging taut in the middle of an ice-covered landscape like a single bubble of summer nectar, I could see how my life could be stretched out in front of me."