“Me, when I’m utterly exhausted by it all, when my skin breaks out, on those lonely evenings when I call my friends again and again and nobody’s home, then I despise my own life – my birth, my upbringing, everything.”

Even when I try to stir myself up, I just get irritated because I can’t make anything come out. And in the middle of the night I lie here thinking about all this. If I don’t get back on track somehow, I’m dead, that’s the sense I get. There isn’t a single strong emotion inside me.

I wonder what it felt to move to a country where you didn’t grow up. I had thought about that often since my sister got married. Do you become a character in a story native to that land, or do you, somewhere in your heart, want to return to your homeland.

Why is it that everything I eat when I’m with you is so delicious?’ I laughed. ‘Could it be that you’re satisfying hunger and lust at the same time?

The place I like best in this world is the kitchen. No matter where it is, no matter what kind, if it’s a kitchen, if it’s a place where they make food, it’s fine with me. Ideally it should be well broken in. Lots of tea towels, dry and immaculate. Where tile catching the light (ting! Ting!)” (p. 3).

When someone tells you something big, it’s like you’re taking money from them, and there’s no way it will ever go back to being the way it was. You have to take responsibility for listening.

I never tell my boyfriend that I’m busy when I’m not. No matter how effective they are, cheap techniques like that just don’t agree with me. So it’s always okay, it’s always all right. In my opinion the surest way to hook a man is to be as open with him as possible.

Once you’ve recognized your own limits, you’ve raised yourself to a higher level of being, since you’re closer to the real you.

Everyone lives the way she knows best. What I mean by ‘their happiness’ is living a life untouched as much as possible by the knowledge that we are really, all of us, alone. That’s not a bad thing.

This world of ours is piled high with farewells and goodbyes of so many different kinds, like the evening sky renewing itself again and again from one instant to the next-and I didn’t want to forget a single one.

Fate is a ladder on which you cannot afford to miss a single rung. To skip out on even one step would mean you’ll never make it to the top.

Why is it we have so little choice? We live like the lowliest worms. Always defeated – defeated we make dinner, we eat, we sleep. Everyone we love is dying. Sill, to cease living is unacceptable.

You know, Chihiro, darling- all it takes is one little wrong step and you end up feeling frustrated your whole life, like me.

It didn’t matter whether he was nearby or far away. His image would drift up into your mind just when you least expected it, shocking you, making your chest pound. Making your heart ache.

The ritual of our daily lives permeate our very bodies.

What was important wasn’t the fireworks, it was that we were together this evening, together in this place, looking up into the sky at the same time.

She was still there inside me now, just as she always was: a life put on hold, a memory I didn’t know how to handle.

I want to be Lon Chaney. I want to be Karloff. I want to help people escape the mundane world. I want to make their skins crawl. And I want them to love it every bit as much as I do.

Poverty has a home in Africalike a quiet second skin.It may be the only place on earth where it is worn with unconscious dignity.

You deal with failure – strike, strike, strike – all the time. Acting is like that. You have to have a very thick skin in a way – your hair is too dark, you’re too ugly for the part, your audition wasn’t good.

It’s a sin problem, not a skin problem.

Those who have never worked nude outdoors just can’t imagine how much better a breeze feels on their skin than an item of sweaty clothing.

After all, film is so porous, and to my mind, so oddly occult, that I think that film itself absorbs odd energies like a living skin.

At the core of my work there is this eternal back-and-forth between being confined to one’s own individuality and that longing to be part of the other, the outside world: the impossibility of ever being able to get beneath another person’s skin.

My great grandma always told me to drink a lot of milk because it’s good for the skin.