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.

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

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?

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