"Sometimes, right after he told me, I would look at him and wonder what it felt like, to have the print of your enemy all the way inside you, right into the way you shaped your thoughts. But I know now."
"My science class has taught me that breathing turns the air inside you to a carbon, a little different from smoke, but a little like it. We have this in common with flames."
"Things grow so fast, it is amazing we don't all lie awake at night, listening to it all happen."
"Here I am. Thirteen at last. Someone should kill me now, I think, as I blow out the candles. Before the damage spreads."
"I pick flowers for my mother as I walk. The neighborhood kids call me Nature Boy. I want to die."
"But here they are, and at the sight of them everything evil in me seems to blow away, like dust from the top of a book."
"For no reason I can account for, I am calm, searching myself for panic and not finding it."
"I can see my grandmother, slicing at her cutting board. I can't see what she's cutting, but I can tell she's cooking something for me."
"She sighed, and it sounded like a sigh that had been learned under a different sorrow."
"I'd always prized silence for being the absence of other noises. In this house I come to see how one can prize silence for being articulate, as well."
"I work there with a spade, carting the dirt off to the marsh's edge, my back aching, but the beauty of work is that it builds you while you build."
"You want a romantic attachment to men, but instead, you are attaching romance to things that men do."
"He was entirely internally preoccupied and it mattered not at all what was going on around him unless it had something to do with something he was drawing."
"And that's, well, that's not what this should be about. Love should be about making you want to live."
"How tear, as in to cry, and tear, as in to rip or pull, how they're spelled the same? You could write them and someone reading would not know if you were crying or separating."
"Envy is like, the skin you're in burns. And the salve is someone else's skin."
"How could he love me? There's nothing to me except a place where the light resists moving forward."
"I couldn't make enough, though, on my own, but didn't want to expand the business, and began looking for a way to leave. But of course, the only way to leave is to just leave."
"It wasn't that my life lacked meaning, but rather that I disliked the meaning it offered to me every morning as I sat at my studio wheel, spinning."
"I was not making great art, but I didn't want to, either. I wanted to make lots of things that added little beauties everywhere, on a daily basis."
"My sister's words about love came to me then: When it's right, she said, you don't have to have a committee meeting about it."
"Bridey and I had been faithful, another expression. I like to think of it as attentive. We were and are attentive. We occupy all of each other's attention."
"Every time you feel less, every time you are more of a stone thing. And you go back every time hoping to feel again."
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