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	However it is debased or misinterpreted, love is a redemptive feature. To focus on one individual so that their desires become superior to yours is a very cleansing experience.   
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	Why is the measure of love... loss? pg.9   
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	Quest is at the heart of what I do-the holy grail, and the terror that you'll never find it, seemed a perfect metaphor for life.   
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	We shall all die, and our lives will be irrelevant then.   
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	Naked is the best disguise.   
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	One room is always enough for one person. Two rooms is not enough for two people. That is one of the conundrums in life.   
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	I am a writer who happens to love women. I am not a lesbian who happens to write.   
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	I believe in communication; books communicate ideas and make bridges between people.   
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	I don't understand why people talk of art as a luxury when it's a mind-altering possibility.   
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	The curious are always in some danger. If you are curious you might never come home.   
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	I like to look at how people work together when they are put into stressful situations, when life stops being cozy.   
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	I never wanted children. If I'd been deeply in love with a man and he'd wanted children, it would have been difficult.   
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	But not all dark places need light, I have to remember that.   
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	Whatever is powerful to you can be translated into something which will matter to somebody that you will never know.   
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	Everything in writing begins with language. Language begins with listening.   
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	In the West, we avoid painful encounters with art by trivialising it, or by familiarising it. Our present obsession with the past has the double advantage of making new work seem raw and rough compared to the cosy patina of tradition, whilst refusing tradition its vital connection to what is happening now.   
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	Confidence and superiority: It's the usual fundamentalist stuff: I've got the truth, and you haven't.   
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	Your weak point is the open, vulnerable place where you can always be hurt. Love, in all its aspects, opens the self so fully.   
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	I felt as if I had blundered into someone else's life by chance, discovered I wanted to stay, then blundered back into my own, without a clue, a hint, or a way of finishing the story.   
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	It is easy to be selfish. It is hard to love who I am. No wonder I am surprised if you do. (p. 199)   
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	I don't read reviews because by then it's too late - whatever anyone says, the book won't change. It is written.   
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	Art saved me; it got me through my depression and self-loathing, back to a place of innocence.   
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	Anything outside marriage seems like freedom and excitement.   
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	The work that lasts over time is the work which still speaks to us when all contemporary interest in that work is extinct.   
