How important things had become, now that they were gone!  I felt a sudden panic that I would soon forget everything.

When it's new and important, you have to rest in between times.  And anyway, even when I like a person there is a weariness that comes.  I can be with someone and everything is fine and then all of a sudden it can wash over me like a sickness, that I need the quiet of my own self.  I need to unload my head and look at what I've got in there so far.  See it.  Think what it means.  I always need to come back to being alone for awhile.  I guess I sort of got used to it when I was younger and now it's mixed in my character like eggs in a cake.  Sometimes I wonder, does this mean I'll have to be a nun or something?

The heart of myself has always been something just wanting so bad.  I have had an empty center, black as a basement, but also knowing about light and waiting.  Young as I am, I know now that everything is about to come.  Jimmy will be the place for me to learn the real happiness.  He will be my Joy School.  My joy.  Mine.

All we have to decide is what to do with the time that is given us.

The scolding voice is her own, so abrasive and quick, yet so powerless to move her.

The silence is perfect, and yet a torment ...

It is frightening, and also exhilarating, her ability to deceive those around her; this is something new, her lost hours, her vivid dreams and shreds of language, as though she'd been given two lives instead of one, the alternate life cloaked in secret.

The recounting of a life is a cheat...even our own stories are obscenely distorted...

He dares not concern himself with the future for fear of disturbing the present.

I remember once when we were moving, driving across country, and it was raining so hard, the windshield wipers going fast and squeaking, and then: nothing.  It stopped.  I looked out the window ahead of me and it was clear.  I looked out the back and there was the rain, still going.  Nobody said anything, but there it was, a near miracle, a rain line, a way of seeing just where something starts, when usually you are just in the middle of it before you notice it.  That's how it feels to me now, to not want to be like (that) anymore.  I see the line.