"None of us mattered to her, not me, or her critics or defenders. No more than bugs on a lampshade."

"For what was living with a man if it wasn't living inside his insanity?"

"One's appreciation of meager comforts, it seems, depends on what misery one has gone through before getting them."

"....Lived in curious but not unhappy isolation…subscribing to magazines nobody around them read, listening to programs on the national radio network which nobody around them listened to…"

"Love dies all the time, or at any rate it becomes distracted, overlaid--it might as well be dead."

"One stroke of lightning does not have to lead anywhere, but to the next stroke of lightning."

"Everybody said to me back home, what do you want to go to Alaska for, and I said, because I've never been there, isn't that a good enough reason?"

"And at the end of his letter one terrible sentence. 'If I loved you I would have written differently."

"It was at this time that she entirely gave up on reading. The covers of books looked like coffins to her, either shabby or ornate, and what was inside them might as well have been dust."

"And did I not think then, What nonsense it is to suppose one man so different from another when all that life really boils down to is getting a decent cup of coffee and room to stretch out in?"

"People who believe in miracles do not make much fuss when they actually encounter one"

"She keeps on hoping from a word from Penelope, but not in any strenuous way. She hopes as people who know better hope for undeserved blessings, spontaneous remissions, things of that sort."

"Now that I think of it, she looked splendid. I wish I had met her somewhere else. I wish I had appreciated her as she deserved. I wish that everything had gone differently."

"Something happened here. In your life there are a few places, or maybe only the one place, were something happened, and then there are all the other places"

"Now I no longer believe that people's secrets are defined and communicable, or their feelings full-blown and easy to recognize."

"I was amazed as people must be who are seized and kidnapped, and who realize that in the strange world of their captors they have a value absolutely unconnected with anything they know about themselves."

"The images, the language, of pornography, and romance are alike; monotonous and mechanically seductive, quickly leading to despair."

"I despised their antics because I took life seriously and had a much more lofty and tender notion of romance. But I would have liked to get their attention just the same."

"There are people who carry decency and optimism around with them, who seem to cleanse every atmosphere they settle in, and you can't tell such people things, it is too disruptive."

"I felt in him what women feel in men, something so tender, swollen, tyrannical, absurd; I would never take the consequences of interfering with it."

"Are people drawn to each other because of the stories they carry inside?"

"Being human means losing everything we love best in the world," she murmured as she released me. "But would you ask to be anything else?"

"You cannot dispute the ridiculous. You cannot argue reasonably with evil."

"I'm at the point where going forward is easier than going back."