Everyone knew vice was bad for any real revolutionary climate.
My heart is broken. It’s turned to a piece of stone. I’m no good. That’s what’s as bad as anything, that I’m no good anymore.
If you could fly you’d want to do something else, like swim.
I always say that if I knew where the good songs came from I’d go there more often.
And it is quite as fair to observe that ignorance and slovenliness and the tradition itself are the inevitable products of just one thing: poverty.
And Xander’s kiss, my first real kiss, makes me press my lips together, try to taste it again.
Is falling in love with someone’s story the same thing as falling in love with the person himself?
She missed him the days when some pretext served to take him away from her, just as one misses the sun on a cloudy day without having thought much about the sun when it was shining.
She is always sad like a house on fire - always something wrong.
Her dad’s body is a castle for her. A shelter and a weapon. When he puts his arm around her shoulders she feels a mixture of terror and comfort.
Her sorrow drags me down like a vengeful current.
You shouldn’t have isolated any of us unless your purpose was to drive us insane. You almost succeeded with me more than once. Humans need one another.
The strange thing about your smile is that it has never once become less real or less intense. It is a smile caught from a moment in a still photograph, now extended into an indefinitely long moving film.
Then he began running away—until he realized there was no "away."
I was left alone with this new feeling of lightness and content.
They grow up and they grow down and grab the earth between their hairy toes and bite the sky with violent teeth and never quit their anger.
They were conquerors, and for that you want only brute force — nothing to boast of, when you have it, since your strength is just an accident arising from the weakness of others.
No one should die alone.
He is all for double lives, triple lives, lives lived in compartments.
Home: it was a phrase one used to mean four walls behind which one slept. There had never been a home.
Which instigates the moral reflection that life is made up of sobs, sniffles, and smiles, with sniffles predominating.
The cities are deserts where people are alone and lonely.
Home. Home. Home is a house in a photograph, a pink house, pink as hollyhocks with lots of startled light.
Edna began to feel like one who awakens gradually out of a dream, a delicious, grotesque, impossible dream, to feel again the realities pressing into her soul.
Newspapers are even worse for me than ice cream; headlines, and the big issues that generate the headlines, are pure fat.
What greatness had not floated on the ebb of that river into the mystery of an unknown earth!…The dreams of men, the seed of commonwealths, the germs of empires.
Is bravery, then, no more than pride? Because there are none to witness the shame shall I retreat?
No multitude of words could have been more significant than those moments of silence, or more pregnant with the first-felt throbbings of desire.
When boys and girls are growing up, life can't stand still, not even in the quietest of country towns; and they have to grow up, whether they will or no. That is what their elders are always forgetting.
Life is nothing without expectation.
Because he talked so little, his words had a peculiar force; they were not worn dull from constant use.
It was a peculiar combination of old-maidishness and licentiousness that made Cutter seem so despicable.
I am not asleep, nor am I awake, and in my reverie things I have seen mingle with things I have read or heard, like rivers of different colour or clarity meeting.
And I think if my own Papa died what would I do. I hold my Papa in my arms. I hold and hold and hold him.
She looked out the window her whole life, the way so many women sit their sadness on an elbow.
His particular kind of rage has always been very controlled, very quiet. The less he says, the angrier he is.
The truth sears, a bitter liquor burning down my throat.
Fear has always seemed to me to run a course, and at its climax the body and perhaps the spirit defend themselves by drawing on some new and fresh source of strength.
There is a legend about a bird which sings just once in its life, more sweetly than any other creature on the face of the earth.
Gone, those times. Closed, sealed, and gone.
I know I am making the choice most dangerous to an artist in valuing life above art.
In heaven’s name what kind of monster would I be, what would I do? Just trying to imagine it was so frightful I wanted to scream.
Possibly the most important thing to a human being, once he is alive and possessed of the means of sustaining life, is that he should do the work he cares most to do and is best capable of doing.
As Antonia said, the wholeworld was changed by the snow; we kept looking in vain for familiarlandmarks.
Now that we know where we’re going, let’s go there. It’s so nice to know where you’re going, in the early stages. It almost rids you of the wish to go there.
Most people in Leadington, like most people elsewhere, are either asleep or dead.
He who has the right to sit in judgment also has the obligation to listen to the defendant’s statement.
She seemed to live in a happy world of her own, only venturing out to meet the few whom she trusted and loved.
Asked to describe death he busied himself taking Polaroid photographs of his questioners.
Yellow dust was dropping from the lime trees, and wild roses grew on the trunks of the apple trees. Pale red, gorged red, fiery, aching, harsh as anger, sweet as drugs.