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“Everything must be carried to term before it is born. To let every impression and the germ of every feeling come to completion inside, in the dark, in the unsayable, the unconscious, in what is unattainable to one’s own intellect, and to wait with deep humility and patience for the hour when a new clarity is delivered: that alone is to live as an artist, in the understanding and in one’s creative work.”

“One just takes more and more enjoyment in them, one grows ever more grateful and somehow better and simpler in seeing the world, deeper in one’s faith in life and happier and larger in living. –”

“You will experience the immense pleasure of reading this book for the first time, and will pass through its innumerable surprises as if in a new dream. But I can tell you that later too one always traverses these books with the same astonishment and that they lose nothing of the wondrous power, relinquish none of the magical qualities, which they lavish on the reader the first time round.”

"no experience is too slight, and the merest occurrence unfolds like a fate, and fate itself is like a wonderful, vast fabric in which every thread is drawn by an infinitely tender hand and laid next to another, held in place and supported by a hundred others.”

“a book full of splendours and depths; the more often one reads it, it seems to contain everything, from life’s faintest scent to the full, grand savour of its heaviest fruits. There is nothing in it that has not been understood, grasped, lived, and known in memory’s trembling, lingering resonance; "

“Live in these books for a while, learn from them what seems to be worth learning, but above all love them. This love will be repaid you thousands and thousands of times, and however your life may turn out – this love, I am sure of it, will run through the weave of your becoming as one of the most important threads of all among the other threads of your experiences, disappointments and joys.”

“we are unutterably alone, and for one person to be able to advise, let alone help, another, a great deal must come about, a great deal must come right, a whole constellation of things must concur for it to be possible at all.”

“For he who creates must be a world of his own and find everything within himself and in the natural world that he has elected to follow.”

“The verdict on it lies in this nature of its origin: there is no other. For this reason, my dear Sir, the only advice I have is this: to go into yourself and to examine the depths from which your life springs; at its source you will find the answer to the question of whether you have to write. Accept this answer as it is, without seeking to interpret it. ”

“Nor will you attempt to interest magazines in these bits of work: for in them you will see your beloved natural possessions, a piece, and a voice, of your life. A work of art is good if it has arisen out of necessity. ”

“And if from this turn inwards, from this submersion in your own world, there come verses, then it will not occur to you to ask anyone whether they are good verses. ”

“ If your everyday life seems to lack material, do not blame it; blame yourself, tell yourself that you are not poet enough to summon up its riches, for there is no lack for him who creates and no poor, trivial place. ”

“Go into yourself. Examine the reason that bids you to write; check whether it reaches its roots into the deepest region of your heart, admit to yourself whether you would die if it should be denied you to write. This above all: ask yourself in your night’s quietest hour: must I write? Dig down into yourself for a deep answer. ”

“Things are not all as graspable and sayable as on the whole we are led to believe; most events are unsayable, occur in a space that no word has ever penetrated, and most unsayable of all are works of art, mysterious existences whose life endures alongside ours, which passes away.”

“I’m sorry,” I say. The phrase becomes a compulsion, a prayer, a warding talisman. I repeat it over and over, I’m sorry I’m sorry I’m sorry. I apologize for the shame we’ve been forced to bear, the shame of other people’s cruelty.

I’m sitting beside Connor, my bare legs crossed, my shorts hitching up my thighs. Matthew and Andy are eyeing me. I grin, shift my position so that my clothes reveal just a bit more, and revel in the heat that unfurls in me as I see a bulge, a blush.

God, sometimes I remember how gross sex is, how it’s all just meat and ooze slapping against one another, but the things he’s murmuring in my ear, the way he’s so excited about me—oh. That in itself is enough.

Part of me wonders if maybe we can actually watch something this time, if I didn’t have to go down that route, but another part of me is craving attention and worship.

Yet I still feel like I should be creatureless, especially during sex. That it’d be embarrassing if a centipede—or more than one!—pops out during my first time with someone. So instead of letting my centipedes emerge discreetly, then hiding them and thereby risking discovery, I teach myself how to swallow my centipedes so that they vanish before they can even be seen.

From then on, I learn from my mother by watching how she controls her own outbursts: whenever my father kisses her on the cheek, a moth emerges from her sleeve and she catches it and crushes it before my father can even open his eyes. By the time he pulls away, the moth has vanished, and my mother is all smiles: the picture of a doting wife.

“I thought how full my life and my head had been for ever with these things, with the desperation to be loved by a man, with the idea that a man’s adoration or need to fuck me would make all the bad parts of myself be quiet for ever."

“I remembered how much I had once loved to learn things. I could see myself back in the library in Waterford surrounded by reference books and encyclopedias, where I would sit all day, learning things because I wanted to know them, not to tell them to anybody else or to become someone different than I really was.”

“Once you’ve said no, a man wheedling feels unbearable. Even if he does it politely, or gently, it overrides the clearly expressed intention. It says: Your choice does not really matter. What I desire matters, and I don’t want to feel bad for forcing you into it. So perhaps you ought to reconsider?”

“It was already so near to impossible to say no to a man, so difficult to accept the possibility of being hurt or disliked or shouted at. It takes so much out of you to make yourself say no when you have been taught to say yes, to be accommodating, to make men happy.”

“That night Mark kissed me and I let him. It was the easy thing to do, the only thing to do. The idea of telling him not to and the ensuing conversation filled me with weariness. I wondered how many times in my life I had made this calculation, how the men would feel if they knew, if they would care.”

“I hate my weakness, what I severed of myself and gave to him, but love it too, love it still. I do not take it back. I love the girl who did those things. I love the girl because I feel sorry for her, and understand her.”

“When they speak this way I am even less in my body than usual, feeling the sickness of a stranger look me in the eye and describe what is not there. What I am feeling is their disregard for my reality. I am being made to wear whatever particular fantasy they wish to project.”

“I hate now for men to dote in this way, the ones who don’t know me. Their praise lands uncertainly in the air somewhere between the two of us, because it doesn’t belong to me. I hate to hear them tell me what I am, even or especially when what they think I am is kind or brilliant or beautiful.”

“I had suffered, and I had made the suffering into something I could consider good. I made it so that suffering was a kind of work.”

“These stories hurt me so badly, but I’ve learned to react to that hurt by thinking of them again and again, forcing myself to replay the details over and over and over, until they are meaningless.
You grow cold, or you die yourself.”