And only weaklings...who lack courage and the power to feel they're right when the whole world says they're wrong, ever lose.

Why is there happiness and comfort and excitement where you are and no where else in the world.

I take a sun bath and listen to the hours, formulating, and disintegrating under the pines, and smell the resiny hardihood of the high noon hours. The world is lost in a blue haze of distances, and the immediate sleeps in a thin and finite sun.

She felt the essence of herself pulled finer and smaller like those streams of spun glass that pull and stretch till there remains but a glimmering illusion. Neither falling nor breaking, the stream spins finer. She felt herself very small and ecstatic. Alabama was in love.

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.

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.

Anything incomprehensible has a sexual significance to many people under thirty-five.