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....

I don’t want to live, I want to love first and live incidentally.

The macabre who lived through the war have a story they loved to tell about the soldiers of the Foreign Legion giving a ball in the expanses around Verdun and dancing with the corpses. Alabama’s...

My dear, I think of you always and at night I build myself a warm nest of things I remember and float in your sweetness till morning.

. . . she tried to weave the strength of her father and the young beauty of her first love with David, the happy oblivion of her teens and her warm protected childhood into a...

It was good to be a stranger in a land when you felt aggressive and acquisitive, but when you began to weave your horizons into some kind of shelter it was good to know that...

With adolescent Nietzscheanism, she already planned to escape on the world’s reversals from the sense of suffocation that seemed to her to be eclipsing her family, her sisters, and mother. She, she told herself, would...

And only weaklings…who lack courage and the power to feel they’re right when the whole world says they’re wrong, ever lose.

A southern moon is a sodden moon, and sultry. When it swamps the fields and the rustling sandy roads and the sticky honeysuckle hedges in its sweet stagnation, your fight to hold on to reality...

I don’t want to live— I want to love first, and live…incidentally.

She wished she could help David to seem more legitimate. She wished she could do something to keep everything from being so undignified. Life seemed so uselessly extravagant.

Do you think you are easy, my illusive possession?

Emptying the ashtrays was very expressive of myself. I just lump everything in a great heap which I have labeled ‘the past,’ and having thus emptied this deep reservoir that was once myself, I am...

They hadn’t much faith in travel, nor a great belief in a change of scene as a panacea for spiritual ills; they were simply glad to be going.

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

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

She refused to be bored chiefly because she wasn’t boring.

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