He announces that lately he keeps losing things. "Like your wife and child, " I want to say, but don´t. At fourty, I´ve learned not to say everything clever, not to score every point.

My mother is a firm believer in the long pause, useful in interrogations, proclamations of truth, and the occasional cutting dead of someone without their knowing it.

Delusion detests focus and romance provides the veil.

I mentally bless and exonerate anyone who has kicked a chair out from beneath her or swallowed opium in large chunks. My mind has met their environment, here in the void. I understand perfectly.

In so many senseless deaths, beauty is to blame.

Why is edamame always ready to expire? It´s so urgent for a vegetable. Edamame. It sounds like an assisted form of suicide. Is there an advertising concept in this?

I used to loathe ambivalence now I adore it. Ambivalence is my new best friend.

The snag about marriage is, it isn´t worth the divorce.

They feel life is for the taking, and that everyone deserves happiness no matter what the cost. I must remember these tricks if I ever decide to have my soul surgically removed.

Surprises, I feel now, are primarily a form of violence.

I love you as the mother of my child": the kiss of death.Mother of His Child: demotion. I am beginning to see this truism: Mothers are not always wives. I have been stripped of a piece of self.

Being HIV positive doesn’t necessarily mean that you are going to die before each and every person who is HIV negative.

...perhaps it wasn't a matter of strength so much as pliability, a willingness to let life become unpredictable and sometimes even unravel.

It is frequently a misfortune to have very brilliant men in charge of affairs. They expect too much of ordinary men.

In my worst moments, all I had to do was recall the love that I felt emanating from those heavenly lights and I could press on.

A lot of people think that it was about Biggie on the East Coast and 2Pac on the West Coast. It wasn't like that. Big ran New York. 2Pac ran America.

Bread takes the effort of kneading but also requires sitting quietly while the dough rises with a power all its own.

Every present state of a simple substance is the natural consequence of its preceding state, in such a way that its present is big with its future.

If you don't like your job, you don't strike! You just go in every day, and do it really half assed. That's the American way.

Hearts will never be practical until they can be made unbreakable.

I thought you were just mean," Reagan said. "I liked that about you.