I love you, even if there isn’t any me, or any love, or even any life. I love you.

I can't read or sleep. Without hope or youth or money I sit constantly wishing I were dead.

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.

I believed I was a salamander, and it seems I am nothing but an impediment.

memories should be sharp when one has nothing else to live for

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

Being in love, she concluded, is simply a presentation of our pasts to another individual, mostly packages so unwieldy that we can no longer manage the loosened strings alone.