By the time a person has achieved years adequate for choosing a direction, the die is cast and the moment has long since passed which determined the future.

It's terrible to allow conventional habits to gain a hold on a whole household; to eat, sleep and live by clock ticks.

We walked at night towards a cafe blooming with Japanese lanterns and I followed your white shoes gleaming like radium in the damp darkness. Rising off the water, lights flickered an invitation far enough away to be interpreted as we liked; to shimmer glamourously behind the silhouette of retrospective good times when we still believed in summer hotels and the philosophies of popular songs.

Women, despite the fact that nine out of ten of them go through life with a death-bed air either of snatching-the-last-moment or with martyr-resignation, do not die tomorrow--or the next day. They have to live on to any one of many bitter ends.

I wish I could write a beautiful book to break those hearts that are soon to cease to exist: a book of faith and small neat worlds and of people who live by the philosophies of popular songs.

And, Joey, if you ever want to know about the japonicas and the daisy fields it will be alright that you have forgotten because I will be able to tell you about how it felt to be feeling that way you cannot quite remember – that will be for the time when something happens years from now that reminds you of now.

It seemed to Alabama that, reaching her goal, she would drive the devils that had driven her - that, in proving herself, she would achieve that peace which she imagined went only in surety of one’s self - that she would be able, through the medium of the dance, to command her emotions, to summon love or pity or happiness at will, having provided a channel through which they might flow. She drove herself mercilessly, and the summer dragged on.