“I always think that everybody is getting their ideas in the shower and the people who are writing them down, keeping the soggy notes, are the writers.”

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“It was like the classic scene in the movies where one lover is on the train and one is on the platform and the train starts to pull away, and the lover on the platform begins to trot along and then jog and then sprint and then gives up altogether as the train speeds irrevocably off. Except in this case I was all the parts: I was the lover on the platform, I was the lover on the train. And I was also the train.”

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“No parent who is raising a black teenager and trying to get him to read serious fiction for his high school English class would ever argue that Huckleberry Finn is not a greatly problematic work. But the remedy is not to replace ‘nigger’ with alternative terms like ‘slave’ (the latter word is already in the novel and has a different meaning from ‘nigger,’ so that substitution just mucks up the prose—its meaning, its voice, its verisimilitude). The remedy is to refuse to teach this novel in high school and to wait until college—or even graduate school—where it can be put in proper context.”

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“Unlike chocolates, houses are predictable: you always know you’re getting rot and decay and a long, tough mortgage. Eat them or put them back in the box—you can’t do either without a lawsuit or an ordinance hearing.”

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“I cried for the boyfriends I was no longer with, the people and places I no longer knew very well, for my parents and grandparents ailing and stuck in Florida, their tough, unchanging forms conjured only in memory: a jewel box kept in a medicine cabinet in the attic of a house on the moon; that’s where their unchanging forms were kept. I cried for everyone and for all the scrabbly, funny love one sent out into the world like some hit song that enters space and bounds off to another galaxy, a tune so pretty you think the words are true, you do! There was never any containing a song like that, keeping it. It went off and out, speeding out of earshot or imagining or any reach at all, like a rocket invented in sleep.”

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