“Many kids, it seemed, would find out that their parents were flawed, messed-up people later in life, and I didn’t appreciate getting to know it all so strong and early.”

Mom flipped through the magazines like the pages needed to be slapped.

As a writer you ask yourself to dream while awake.

You can ruin anything if you focus at it.

I peeled the skin off a grape in slippery little triangles, and I understood then that I would be undressing every item of food I could because my clothes would be staying on.

I was right at the edge of their circle, like the tail of a Q…

It seems the best work I do is when I am really allowing the unconscious to rule the page and then later I can go back and hack around and make sense of things.

I knew if I ate anything of hers again, it would lkely tell me the same message: help me,

It seemed to happen in springs, the revealing of things.

I am not happy, help me — like a message in a bottle sent in each meal to the eater, and I got it. I got the message.

Light is good company, when alone; I took my comfort where I found it, and the warmest yellow bulb in the living-room lamp had become a kind of radiant babysitter all its own.

It was like we were exchanging codes, on how to be a father and a daughter, like we’d read about it in a manual, translated from another language, and were doing our best with what we could understand.

Pouring over me, but it was a different kind, siphoned from a different, and tamer, body of water. I was her darling daughter; Joseph was her it.

I like birthday cake. It’s so symbolic. It’s a tempting symbol to load with something more complicated than just ‘Happy birthday!’ because it’s this emblem of childhood and a happy day.

My genes, my love, are rubber bands and rope; make yourself a structure you can live inside. Amen.” – Aimee Bender (Willful Creatures: Stories)

Glen Hirshberg’s stories are haunting, absolutely, but not only because of the content.

I’m obsessed with adolescence. I love to write about people in their 20s.

The true Mason is ever vigilant for subtle traces of character and personality flaws which daily experience brings out.

My most serious character flaw is that I don’t deny myself much.

I do think the patriotic thing to do is to critique my country. How else do you make a country better but by pointing out its flaws?

Your imperfections make you perfect.

Judge not for your flaws, but for your Triumphs!

I want you to love me for me so that all my flaws stitch together and make me whole.

She was only a collection of flaws and she was beautiful.

It’s okay not to be perfect. Your imperfections are what make you YOU. And at the end of the day, people like real people, flaws and all. At least I do.