Millie Beggs, by the time she was forty-five, had become an emotional anarchist.

There's nothing on earth to do here but look at the view and eat. You can imagine the result since I do not like to look at views.

Death is the only real elegance.

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

There seemed to be some heavenly support beneath his shoulder blades that lifted his feet from the ground in ecstatic suspension, as if he secretly enjoyed the ability to fly but was walking as a compromise to convention.

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.

The trouble with emergencies is," she said, "that I always put on my finest underwear and then nothing happens.