The night you gave me my birthday party... you were a young Lieutenant and I was a fragrant phantom, wasn't I? And it was a radiant night, a night of soft conspiracy and the trees agreed that it was all going to be for the best.

Other people's ideas of us are dependent largely on what they've hoped for.

Oh, the secret life of man and woman--dreaming how much better we would be than we are if we were somebody else or even ourselves, and feeling that our estate has been unexploited to its fullest.

Experience teaches you how to do things you never want to do again.

Youth doesn't need friends -- it only needs crowds.

Women sometimes seem to share a quiet, unalterable dogma of persecution that endows even the most sophisticated of them with the inarticulate poignancy of the peasant.

I remember every single spot of light that ever gouged a shadow beside your bones.