But then, not long after, in another article, Loftus writes, "We live in a strange and precarious time that resembles at its heart the hysteria and superstitious fervor of the witch trials." She took rifle lessons and to this day keeps the firing instruction sheets and targets posted above her desk. In 1996, when Psychology Today interviewed her, she burst into tears twice within the first twenty minutes, labile, lubricated, theatrical, still whip smart, talking about the blurry boundaries between fact and fiction while she herself lived in another blurry boundary, between conviction and compulsion, passion and hyperbole. "The witch hunts," she said, but the analogy is wrong, and provides us with perhaps a more accurate window into Loftus's stretched psyche than into our own times, for the witch hunts were predicated on utter nonsense, and the abuse scandals were predicated on something all too real, which Loftus seemed to forget: Women are abused. Memories do matter. Talking to her, feeling her high-flying energy the zeal that burns up the center of her life, you have to wonder, why. You are forced to ask the very kind of question Loftus most abhors: did something bad happen to her? For she herself seems driven by dissociated demons, and so I ask. What happened to you? Turns out, a lot. (refers to Dr. Elizabeth F. Loftus)

— Lauren Slater

Finally, the dawn came, the sky fringed with pink, and the sun bright as a coin in a spill of rising red.

— Lauren Slater

I didn't know then that the mind, like the earth, has several layers: a crust, a mantle, a boiling core.

— Lauren Slater

I looked up "skin" in the encyclopedia and confirmed that, sure enough, it is the human body's largest organ, a fact that suggests our surfaces are critical to who we are, not just the gateway to physical or spiritual depths but a profoundly important web of cells that, in protecting us, gives us form and function.

— Lauren Slater

I never said to myself, I am longing; that feeling lived at a level below language.

— Lauren Slater

... instead of spelling stories you spread silence, which was outside the alphabet.

— Lauren Slater

It is a fundamental misperception," Forts says to me, "to think human life has more value than any other life form.

— Lauren Slater

I watch the sky progress through its morning paces, the light turning from rose to saffron as the sun ascends, its rays like ribbons tangling in the tops of trees.

— Lauren Slater

...tethered to the ground by quotidian conversation.... the window rosy with anemic November light.

— Lauren Slater

...the clear water the color of deeply steeped tea, surrounded by cattails and Gracie grasses.

— Lauren Slater