“He has beautiful hands, fine as earth, rough and warm like brown sand. Sometimes he lets me wash his back and shoulders, which is when I get the marvelling feeling most strongly. I have never told him about this.”

“I don’t say: far away life is real with its imaginary places I say: life here is possible.”

“But happiness, for me, is a strange, tumultuous feeling, composed of endless evasions, always in danger of collapse.”

“I find value in thinking in stories. Aren’t we all woven through with stories? Isn’t that how we think of our lives, how we survive them? Now, when someone hurts me, I remember that they are only living the terms of their own fictions—sometimes desperately—so their selves don’t unravel.”