“No, women like you don't write. They carve onion sculptures and potato statues. They sit in dark corners and braid their hair in new shapes and twists in order to control the stiffness, the unruliness, the rebelliousness.”

“Ordering a man to write a poem is like commanding a pregnant woman to give birth to a red-haired child.”

“With her braided hair and white dress, she seemed to glow in the moonlight.”

“I don't want to make plop art — sculpture that just gets plopped down in places. I wouldn't want to litter every corner of the world with my sculpture.”

“Carter, not to be unkind," I said, "but the last few months you've been seeing messages about Zia. Two weeks ago, you thought she was sending you a distress call in your mashed potatoes."
"It was a Z! Carved right in the potatoes!”

“What if the puzzle of the world was a shape you didn't fit into? And the only way to survive was to mutilate yourself, carve away your corners, sand yourself down, modify yourself to fit? How come we haven't been able to change the puzzle instead?”

“There is a way to master silence
Control its curves, inhabit its dark corners
And listen to the hiss of time outside”

“Dark hair fell in a sweep over his forehead. He looked like a man who would write vers libre, as indeed he did.”

“Tasmania is famous for its shape, which is the same shape as the pubic hair region on a woman's body, which I personally don't identify with. Mine's more like a map of the former Soviet Union. Not to scale.”

“I think he writes the truth. Because life is like that most of the time in some shape or form, whether it’s illness or the end of the world. Cormac’s a writer’s writer. You read his writing and think, I can do that, and then you sit down and try. And you try, dude.”