Quotes from Francesca Lia Block

He smells like night-blooming flowers Crushed, juicy petals on the pillows His voice is full of ocean Humming like the surf He kneels before me like I am his goddess He is a god

It felt like they were telling each other secrets. Everything they said felt like that—whispered, tender, full of other meanings, like when you tell someone a dream or talk about your astrological signs as code for all the things you love about each other.

War is being reminded that you are completely at the mercy of death at every moment, without the illusion that you are not. Without the distractions that make life worth living.

Beauty loved him more than anything, her Beast boy, but, secretly, sometimes, she wished he would have remained a Beast.

Non sum qualis eram. I am not what I once was.

She pushed the gardener away and called for them. In her sleep she had seen love. It was poisoning. It was possessing. Devouring. Or it was seven pairs of boots climbing up the stairs to find her.

We try on different dresses, different selves, but our souls are always the same - ongoing, full of light.

You turned your head to look at me. Your eyes looked so big in your face, so mysterious — wide and flickering like a butterfly-wing mask. When you saw me the wails turned to sobs, and then just quieter heaves of your body. I held out my finger through the bars. Then you reached out and curled your fingers around mine, so tight. I knew you recognized me. That was the first time I knew I had a heart inside my body.

He said, You're so tiny, like a doll, you look like you might break. I wanted him to break me. Part of me did.

This was not a fairy tale. This was not the movies. This was life. It hurt more. It was excruciating. It was excruciatingly beautiful.

In order to have bliss you have to be able to accept all the parts of the other, all the wildness and the darkness. You have to be able to hold on.

Sometimes she wore Levi's with white-suede fringe sewn down the legs and a feathered Indian headdress, sometimes old fifties' taffeta dresses covered with poetry written in glitter, or dresses made of kids' sheets printed with pink piglets or Disney characters.

My mother said, kiss him, darling, it's easy so natural and I thought to myself, not with lips of stone, dear mother, not with lips of stone

love is the only thing we have to save us

When they first kiss, there on the beach, they will kneel at the edge of the Pacific and say a prayer of thanks, sending all the stories of love inside them out in a fleet of bottles all across the oceans of the world.

Maybe one night I'll be asleep and I'll feel a hand like a dove on my cheekbone and feel her breath cool like peppermints and when I open my eyes my mom will be there like an angle, saying in the softest voice, When you are born it is like a long, long dream. Don't try to wake up. Just go along until it is over. Don't be afraid. You may not know it all the time but I am with you. I am with you.

You still cry too easily, but without your tears, at least, everything would burn. You are Spring in your jeans, in the laughing leaves. I think pearls melted over your bones.

I was staring to learn how to forget the things that made me sad. It was like a charm you followed step-by-step, collecting and blending the ingredients, placing everything in its proper place, reciting the incantation. It was the magic of forgetting.

He was so handsome,but he didn't look well.He reminded her of a cigarette.

for frail but surprisingly strong fairies who had lost their way above ground for burned mermaids and sick vampire girls for wild wolfish women with sharp teeth and leaves in their hair

You can't doubt so much, Psyche

She wasn't crying at all. This was what scared him the most. Where had she locked up the things he'd seen her feeling that day when she heard? She wasn't that big a girl to hold all of it—to hold her brother's life and his death inside of her. To hold all his long-limbed raging tidal motion and all the loss of that.

Just like any woman,...we weave our stories out of our bodies. Some of us through our chicdren, or our art; some do it just by living. It's all the same.

Ugster vinyl pumps, Partridge Family records, plastic daisy jewelry, old postcards. . . . It's a magpie Christmas market.