My body never belonged to me. You must have felt that too. If someone wanted to beat me, they could beat me. If someone wanted to lock me in the closet, they could. Childhood is such a perverse injustice, I don’t know how anyone survives it without going crazy. But I have a chance to turn the tables. I have a chance to run the streets and be a wealthy woman. No one is ever, ever, ever going to treat me with disrespect again.

If there was one thing responsible for ruining lives, it was love.

Scientists could make a human, but they could not make an artist.

As soon as I looked at Alphonse’s face, I knew that he was dead. I had the strange feeling that I was dead myself. It felt as if I were lying at the bottom of a grave and earth was being thrown on me. When death takes someone you know, he holds you and whispers all his secrets in your ear.

He said that when you are in love with someone, you want to follow them to the bathroom. He said love just makes you pathetic.

Mothers took your problems from you and fretted about them for you, even if there was no reason on earth why they should, even if you had done everything to create your own mess.

Poor people knew that all good times had to be paid for.

In Moscow there were a hundred different words for sadness, and one of them was joy.

There was a scent called Five Minutes Before It Rains. If you put it on your neck, whoever kissed you would cry.

Everything written by any woman was written by all women, because they all benefited from it. If one woman was a genius, it was proof that it was possible for the rest of them.