“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.”

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.

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)

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.

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.

I watched as she added a question mark at the end. Arc, line, space, dot.

I give boring people something to discuss over corn.

I think the British have the distinction above all other nations of being able to put new wine into old bottles without bursting them.

Elixir’ means magical potion, so I wanted to depict the kind of bottle that was used in ancient times, but that looked modern and chic as well. I also wanted it to have a golden tint to evoke the memories of sands and sunsets.

Tranquilizers work only if you follow the advice on the bottle – keep away from children.

Breast-feeding may succumb to the bottle; cuddling, fondling, and paediatric visits may also be done by fathers…but when a child needs a mother to talk to, nobody else but a mother will do.

Wherever you look there’s meanness and corruption. This room, this bottle of grape wine, these fruits in the basket, are all products of profit and loss.

I don’t remember the specific ones she used, but I remember the bottles.

The British brand is so popular particularly in the US that they put the union jack flag on top of beer bottles because it sells.

Wine is bottled poetry.