“I don’t really want to become normal, average, standard. I want merely to gain in strength, in the courage to live out my life more fully, enjoy more, experience more. I want to develop even more o...”

“I disregard the proportions, the measures, the tempo of the ordinary world. I refuse to live in the ordinary world as ordinary women. To enter ordinary relationships. I want ecstasy. I am a neuroti...”

“At first I protested and rebelled against poetry. I was about to deny my poetic worlds. I was doing violence to my illusions with analysis, science, and learning Henry’s language, entering Henry’s ...”

“I am aware of being in a beautiful prison, from which I can only escape by writing.”

“I can elect something I love and absorb myself in it.”

“The other night we talked about literature's elimination of the unessential, so that we are given a concentrated "dose" of life. I said, almost indignantly, "That's the danger of it, it prepares yo...”

“At times, Melete continued, it had seemed to her that this fact was what had created this behavior. Her sense of reality, in other words, had created something outside itself that mocked and hated ...”

“Dr Allendy said that it was necessary to become equal to life, that the romantic was defeated by life, really died of it, whether by tuberculosis in the old days, or by neurosis today. I had never ...”

“...for in that city [New York] there is neurosis in the air which the inhabitants mistake for energy.”

“What the world stigmatizes as romantic is often more nearly allied to the truth than is commonly supposed.”

“Sky, wait. The way his voice wraps around my name makes me wish the only word in his entire vocabulary way Sky.”

“I'm not going to do it again," Lena Marquez whispered to the red purse across the hall from her nestle of blankets. "Never again.”