"Even if you are alive somewhere, the absence of the other person who used to be there beside you obliterates your presence. Everything in the room, even the stars in the sky, can disappear in a second, changing one scene for another, just like in a dream."

"Carlos: So, what, were they psychos, or... Seth: Did they look like psychos? Is that what they looked like? They were vampires. Psychos do not explode when sunlight hits them, I don't give a fuck how crazy they are!"

"What can the England of 1940 have in common with the England of 1840? But then, what have you in common with the child of five whose photograph your mother keeps on the mantelpiece? Nothing, except that you happen to be the same person."

"I like the idea of living in a city - any city, especially a strange one - like the thought of traffic and crowds, of working in a bookstore, waiting tables in a coffee shop, who knew what kind of odd, solitary life I might slip into? Meals alone, waling the dogs in the evenings; and nobody knowing who I was."

"It's really unfair to working women in America who read celebrity news and think, 'Why can't I lose weight when I've had a baby?' Well, everyone you're reading about has money for a trainer and a chef. That doesn't make it realistic."

"Keep your hands off me.” She spoke viciously, through her teeth, and he caught a glimpse of her deVere ancestry. She was a virago in tiny, fragile, fairy form."

"I was thinking how complicated life is and how there are no simple roads or paths. We are a fabric of mistakes and hurts; a family tree of fumbled attempts, successes and failures."

"I feel like I am a real artist and I want to be able to feel what I am singing about. So when I sing, 'Leave (Get Out),' I have been through that. I think it is just a new generation, whether people are ready for it or not. Teenagers are dating."

"Death is the night sky, the background against which the fleeting fireworks of life are displayed, an empty stage upon which the drama of life is played."

"Some days I wonder how I'll get through a whole lifetime of thinking. A life that's just words, words, words, shuffling around in my head. Was I born that way?"

"All the accounts of the burial of Jesus are somber, laced through with the silence of grief, the shock that violence does to one's soul, even experienced vicariously in the body of another who is loved. They are written as though they are dirges, laments hidden in the silences and spaces between the words."