All I want to be is very young always and very irresponsible and to feel that my life is my own-to live and be happy and die in my own way to please myself

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.

Oh, we are going to be so happy away from all the things that almost got us but couldn't quite because we were too smart for them!

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.

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

Nobody has ever measured, not even poets, how much the heart can hold.

Life has puffed and blown itself into a summer day, and clouds and spring billow over the heavens as if calendars were a listing of mathematical errors.