Sometimes a mind is just born late, coming through waves on a slower journey. You were never, in the end, alone. Isn’t it a blessing, what becomes from inside the alone.

Words carry oceans on their small backs.

It is possible to make family any way you like. It is possible to love men without rage. There are thousands of ways to love men.

We are all swimmers before the dawn of oxygen and earth. We all carry the memory of that breathable blue past.

Language is a metaphor for experience. It’s as arbitrary as the mass of chaotic images we call memory–but we can put it into lines to narrativize over fear.

my parents Oedipal fakers

Be able to go shopping for a bathing suit and not become depressed afterward.

It takes a strong person to stand up to his or her fate and overcome the obstacles that stand in the way of freedom and success, but I believe in you.

To be alive at all involves some risk.

When I started to work on perfume, I could not reduce the idea of a woman to one smell.

If a problem can be solved it will be. If it can not be solved there is no use worrying about it.

We think of Starbucks not as a coffee company but a media company.

I never deal in transformations, for they are not honest, and no respectable sorceress likes to make things appear to be what they are not.

The culture is just so coarse that you have to take it to that level and people will be like, 'Whoa!' And then you can make people think about stuff. It's kind of like shock therapy.

The opera always loses money. That's as it should be. Opera has no business making money.

I don't object to nine aces in one deck. But when a man lays down five aces in one hand... and besides, I know what I dealt him!