Quotes from Francesca Lia Block

Love is the worst earthquake there is. Can crush you to the thickness of your bones. Love can be like cancer sometimes. Terminal. It can make you vomit. It can make you want to cut it out. It can take you over against your will.

L.A. kills people.' Jacaranda said. 'You're lucky you're leaving. You'll be able to write.' She looked paler, going through another depression, smoking in bed in her lilac room. The walls were the color of her veins. She was getting too thin, even for the modeling. . .Jacaranda died last winter when the flowering trees were bare. You couldn't even tell which ones once cried the purple blossoms she named herself after.

I pounded through the houses, staggering down the hallways, falling down the steps. It was a hot streaky dawn full of insecticides, exhaust, flowers that could make you sick or fall in love. My battered Impala was still parked there on the side of the road and I wanted to lie down on the shredded seats and sleep and sleep. But I thought of the bones; I could hear them singing. They needed me to write their song.

It was always a relief when she came home to him. Like water or food. Like music or that moment when you cut yourself with a knife and squeeze the skin and no blood oozes out.

Same old boring boring story America can't stop telling itself. What is this sicko fascination? Every book and movie practically has to have a little, right? But why do you think all those runaways are on the streets tearing up their veins with junk and selling themselves so they can sleep in the gutter? What do you think the alternative was at home?

She knew they were all afraid. But love and disease are both like electricity, Weetzie thought. They are always there -- you can't see or smell or hear, touch or taste them, but you know they are there like a current in the air. We can choose, Weetzie thought, we can choose to plug into the love current instead.

It was like when we were little kids and we played games on the ivy-covered hillside in the backyard. We were warriors and wizards and angels and high elves and that was our reality. If someone said, Isn't it cute, look at them playing, we would have smiled back, humoring them, but it wasn't playing. It was transformation. It was our own world. Our own rules.

Welcome Beauty, banish fear.

You have to make your own family, your own life.

There's nowhere to escape," Dobey said, jamming his hands into his pockets and staring into the Valley. That's not true, baby," said Desiree. She took his hands and pulled him to her, wrapping her legs around his torso. She could feel the sobs in both of them, but quiet, silenced by the kiss. They could escape inside each other.

Think about the word destroy. Do you know what it is? De-story. Destroy. Destory. You see. And restore. That's re-story. Do you know that only two things have been proven to help survivors of the Holocaust? Massage is one. Telling their story is another. Being touched and touching. Telling your story is touching. It sets you free.

What time are we upon and where do I belong?

The happier you are, the less you need.

Everything was fine, but Weetzie wanted a baby. "How could you want one?" My Secret Agent Lover Man said. "There are way too many babies. And diseases. And nuclear accidents. And crazy psychos. We cant have a baby," he said.

I think that poetry is perfect for women raising children, with just bits of time and such need to connect to other women out of the isolation of motherhood.

I didn't tell him that what I was most scared of, most haunted by, was something I didn't understand and could never run away from. It was myself.

Maybe he was real. Maybe I'd made him up. Either way, he didn't think I needed him anymore. Maybe he was right.

What did it mean for us? Because everything I did, everything that happened to me, that was what I asked myself - what does this mean for us. It meant that I was farther away from you, different. It meant that if we let ourselves, we could get closer than we had ever been. Disappear into each other. You'd bleed and I wouldn't. Then we both would.

He might be faithless but I believe in him.

So Witch Baby played. Tossing her head, sucking in her cheeks and popping up with the impact of each beat. Thrusting her whole body into the music and thrusting the music into the air around her. She imagined that her drums were planets and the music was all the voices of growth and light and life joined together and traveling the universe.

Tinys do not deserve safety. If they are to prove themselves, they must suffer and die or suffer and survive.

All the things that girls feel they are not when they fear that if they become, if they are, they will no longer be loved by the sisters whose hearts they have not meant to break. And besides, if the sisters are gone and only the beloved remains with his dense curls and his lips, how safe are you then? You have to have him or you will die if the sisters are gone with their listening ears and their feet to rub and their bodies to dress and their shared loneliness.

My reading and studying and retellings of old stories didn't do anything except help me think better. I was at least thoughtful. Too thoughtful, my friends said. And all I thought about was myths and old paintings that made me feel drunk on wine or struck my lightning but didn't matter to most people.

Baby, I love you. Pen... More then I love the color black. More than I love cigarettes, more than I love books. Even music. More than food. More than art or stories. More than words...