"My love, what you see over there aren’t stars. It’s your nervous system."

"We want Eros. It’s like a drug. It’s not domestic. What’s the difference between a husband knocking on a door and a sailor getting off a ship? About ten thousand volts."

"Having perfected our disguise, we spend our lives searching for someone we don’t fool."

"

Make love to me in Spanish.
Not with that other tongue.
I want you juntito a mi,
tender like the language
crooned to babies.
I want to be that
lullabied, mi bien
querido, that loved.

I want you inside
the mouth of my heart,
inside the harp of my wrists,
the sweet meat of the mango,
in the gold that dangles
from my ears and neck.

Say my name. Say it.
The way it’s supposed to be said.
I want to know that I knew you
even before I knew you.

"

"How odd I can have all this inside me and to you it’s just words."

"A gentleman is simply a patient wolf."

"It was curious to think that the sky was the same for everybody. And the people under the sky were also very much the same—everywhere, all over the world, hundreds or thousands of millions of people just like this, people ignorant of one another’s existence, held apart by walls of hatred and lies, and yet almost exactly the same—people who had never learned to think but were storing up in their hearts and bellies and muscles the power that would one day overturn the world."

"Angry, and half in love with you, and tremendously sorry, I turned away."

"No tree, it is said, can grow to Heaven unless its roots reach down to Hell."

"More and more, it feels like I’m doing a really bad impersonation of myself."

"Nobody can save you but yourself — and you’re worth saving. It’s a war not easily won but if anything is worth winning — this is it."

"It’s dark because you are trying too hard. Lightly child, lightly. Learn to do everything lightly. Yes, feel lightly even though you’re feeling deeply. Just lightly let things happen and lightly cope with them. I was so preposterously serious in those days…Lightly, lightly—it’s the best advice ever given me. So throw away your baggage and go forward. There are quicksands all about you, sucking at your feet, trying to suck you down into fear and self-pity and despair. That’s why you must walk so lightly. Lightly, my darling."

"People tell you who they are, but we ignore it because we want them to be who we want them to be."

"We sacrifice ourselves for each other. And that guilt that we feel when we let somebody down or when they’re afraid of us when they think they’re gonna kill us is a sort of excommunication phobia where we’re not being good monkeys, we’re not doing this right, this person’s afraid of me, I hurt somebody. I’m not long for this world if I gotta function on my own. I will not survive out there."