“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.”

That at the same time of this very intimate act of concentrating so carefully on the details of our mother’s palm and fingertips.

But I loved George in part because he believed me; because if I stood in a cold, plain room and yelled FIRE, he would walk over and ask me why.

To see someone you love, in a bad setting, is one of the great barometers of gratitude.

We’re all getting too smart. Our brains are just getting bigger and bigger, and the world dries up and dies when there’s too much thought and not enough heart.

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.

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.