God knows there certainly ought to be a window around here somewhere, for all of us.

Never say anything that doesn't improve on silence.

No one forgets the truth; they just get better at lying.

Your cowardly self-delusions about “love” when you know as well as I do that there’s never been anything between us but contempt and distrust and a terrible sickly dependence on each other’s weakness- that’s why. That’s why I couldn’t stop laughing about the Inability to Love, and that’s why I can’t stand to let you touch me, and that’s why I’ll never again believe in anything you think, let alone anything you say

He knew it was possible for shame to be nursed and doctored like an illness, if you wanted to keep it separate from the rest of your life, but that didn't mean there'd be any way to keep from knowing it was there.

Synchronize watches at oh six hundred' says the infantry captain, and each of his huddled lieutenants finds respite from fear in the act of bringing two tiny pointers into jeweled alignment while tons of heavy artillery go fluttering overhead: the prosaic, civilian-looking dial of the watch has restored, however briefly, an illusion of personal control. Good, it counsels, looking tidily up from the hairs and veins of each terribly vulnerable wrist; fine: so far, everything's happening right on time.

When you wrote it didn't matter if hysteria sometimes came up in your face and voice (unless, of course, you let it find its way into your "literary voice") because writing was done in merciful privacy and silence. Even if you were partly out of your mind it might turn out to be all right: you could try for control even harder than Blanche Dubois was said to have tried, and with luck you could still bring off a sense of order and sanity on the page for the reader. Reading, after all, was a thing done in privacy and silence too.