Quotes from Darcey Steinke

The problem with being a modern woman, I thought, as the front door swung wide, is that you have to pretend to be stronger than you are.

When you love a woman, you love yourself, and it's terrible really, how it seems perfectly possible to swallow the other. With a man you want to join, you want your ribs to connect like handcuffs. But with a woman if you swallow, she becomes you.

You'll see, there are a million ways to kill off the soft parts of yourself.

Everything was new, now I'm a junkie, I seem to need more severe doses of experience to feel anything.

What is love but a nostalgia for someones history? Their boyhood haunts and sullen adolescence, their teenage trips cross-country and fights with their fathers and especially their old lovers?

Relationships are like wall paper patterns, you think your moving forward but your always caught in your own obsessions.

I thought of happy endings, how novelists usually flinched. To admit your characters are doomed means you are too.

For awhile, staring at my paper bag of clothes, my freaked-out eyes in the mirror behind the bar, I convinced myself I would go back to Bell. He was the only man that ever made me feel in life instead of just a spectator, and if he did that by fear and pain, it was still better then when I looked numbly at some man on the couch thinking, I will leave you soon.

The story of Adam and Eve has less to do with evil than the cosmic human sadness that relationships are never straightforward, never pure enough.

I knew people want most what they pretend to hate, that it takes courage to say what you really want.

Nature is most beautiful in its movement: wind, water, the sinking sun.

Say no! I thought. Say you want yourself all for your own self. Say that you have no specific country, say that you are important without any story from above, say that your home is with me and the other girls up in the sky.

birdish cottages on stilts

the outer banks swing out from the coast of North Carolina like the bony curve of a woman's hip

blue and cold as winter stones

Sex is a kind of alchemy. It's the one thing other than death that if used properly can change everything, like that first night with Madison, it's all in my head like a beautiful dream. I remember her skin. Its texture made me believe I'd never die.

I knew you could find a certain relief in begging God, it had helped me, but on the other hand, God never answered directly and that was always depressing.

I spent so much time as a child thinking what if I was a robot, what if my mind were somewhere else? As a kid you're in the middle of all that.

As a child I made a pact with my mother. I agreed that we were doomed, that she and I abided together in a cocoon of melancholy.

I knew people want most what they pretend to hate, that it takes courage to say what you really want.

Everything was new, now I'm a junkie, I seem to need more severe doses of experience to feel anything.