You’re beautiful, but you’re empty. No one could die for you.

Don’t allow your wounds to transform you into someone you are not.

And when at last you find someone to whom you feel you can pour out your soul, you stop in shock at the words you utter— they are so rusty, so ugly, so meaningless and feeble from being kept in the small cramped dark inside you so long.

There is a long marriage between comedy and human suffering, and mental illness, in particular, is easily played for laughs….Sometimes it is hard to shake the feeling that, all jokes aside, there really is an epidemic of human suffering in the world, the full brunt of which is being borne, for now, by only a luckless few.

We are torn between nostalgia for the familiar and an urge for the foreign and strange. As often as not, we are homesick most for the places we have never known.

You have so many layers, that you can peel away a few, and everyone’s so shocked or impressed that you’re baring your soul, while to you it’s nothing, because you know you’ve twenty more layers to go.

What does it matter how many lovers you have if none of them gives you the universe?

Years of love have been forgot in the hatred of a minute.

I wanted to hurt you
but the victory is that I could not stomach it. We have
swallowed him up, they said. It’s beautiful. It really is.
I had a dream about you. We were in the gold room
where everyone finally gets what they want.
You said Tell me about your books, your visions made
of flesh and light and I said This is the Moon. This is
the Sun. Let me name the stars for you. Let me take you
there. The splash of my tongue melting you like a sugar
cube… We were in the gold room where everyone
finally gets what they want, so I said What do you
want, sweetheart? and you said Kiss me. Here I am
leaving you clues. I am singing now while Rome
burns. We are all just trying to be holy. My applejack,
my silent night, just mash your lips against me.
We are all going forward. None of us are going back.

It is discouraging how many people are shocked by honesty and how few by deceit.

To him she seemed so beautiful, so seductive, so different from ordinary people, that he could not understand why no one was as disturbed as he by the clicking of her heels on the paving stones, why no one else’s heart was wild with the breeze stirred by the sighs of her veils, why everyone did not go mad with the movements of her braid, the flight of her hands, the gold of her laughter. He had not missed a single one of her gestures, not one of the indications of her character, but he did not dare approach her for fear of destroying the spell.

Words are like that, they deceive, they pile up, it seems that do not know where to go, and, suddenly, because of two or three or four that suddenly come out, simple in themselves, a personal pronoun, an adverb, an adjective, we have the excitement of seeing them coming irresistibly to the surface through the skin and the eyes and upsetting the composure of our feelings, sometimes the nerves cannot bear it any longer, they put up with a great deal, they put up with everything, it was as if they were wearing armor, we might say.

There is a limit to the amount of misery and disarray you will put up with, for love, just as there is a limit to the amount of mess you can stand around a house. You can’t know the limit beforehand, but you will know when you’ve reached it. I believe this.

One of the most fascinating aspects of human life is the irrational and mysterious subtext: as happy as you are, there is misery all around you. It creeps into your sleep and texts you obituaries. There is your past, and your future, and neither one has any emotional insurance policy to protect you from finding relics (or foreshadowing undertoads) of them floating around in your chardonnay — less like black flies, more like red mosquitoes. Maybe they’re there to remind you of how tightly you should cling to the sunny present, to take nothing for granted, to buy tunics while you’re not in the red.