• from Crazy Woman

“She was a woman wandering around in her underwear. It was a good thing she was desperate and insane or she’d be immoral.”

• from A Killing in New Town

“My mother wanted him to fight — for the South. She is a good Christian woman, and like a lot of good Christian women she figured that the Bible said, ‘Thou shalt not kill except when you can get people together to do it in uniforms.'”

• from Confessions of a Pagan Nun

“Power does not willingly give up its place to truth, though I thought it would.”

• from Careless Love

“He admitted that he’d once thought of killing himself. But now he’s decided that suicide is very rude, like leaving your own party before you open the presents people brought you.”

• from The Changeling

“Perhaps it was simply living each day without succumbing to bitter sorrow over the pain of being human; perhaps it was fighting to savor what one has and to honor what one has lost.”

• from Black Elk in Paris

“Listen. I’ll tell you what I’ve figured out. Now I know why the Spirit of Everything had me stay here so long, until I thought I was going to die here. I figured out that this spirit keeps sending messengers, and people keep not hearing what they’re saying.”

• from X & O “Marla in Empty Space”

“Then Marla said, ‘How can anyone have a good life hanging on this pole in the middle of empty endless fucking space?'”

• from Between the Legs

“They have made each other miserable in many beautiful places.”