Adults, older girls, shops, magazines, newspapers, window signs—all the world had agreed that a blue-eyed, yellow-haired, pink-skinned doll was what every girl child treasured

Say make me, remake me. You are free to do it and I am free to let you because look, look. Look where your hands are. Now.

If happiness is anticipation with certainty, we were happy.

Lonely was much better than alone.

I really want some meaning. It used to be easy to toss it off. Now it's harder and harder. You have to navigate just to find something that has nourishment. It's the absence of nourishment. What do you do in place of nourishment? It's usually junk. Either it's junk food or junk clothes or junk ideas.

A man ain't nothing but a man. But a son? Well, now, that's somebody.

The ability of writers to imagine what is not the self, to familiarize the strange and mystify the familiar, is the test of their power.