“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 is like a protestation against a first waft of ether.”

“Scott is gone.I've had two days with this truth. This truth and me, we're acquainted now, past the shock of our first unhappy meeting and into the uneasy-cohabitation stage. Its barbs are slightly duller than they were that first night, when even breathing felt agonizing and wrong. Tootsie and Marjorie hovered over me, waiting to see whether I'd collapse, while Mama looked on, white-faced, from her rocker by the fire. "Gone?" I would whisper, to no-one in particular. I, too, waited for me to be overwhelmed - but all that happened was what happens to anyone who has lost their one love: my heart cleaved into two parts, before and foreverafterward.”

“Every sort of trouble I can think of, we've tried it out- become expert at some of it, even, so much so that I've come to wonder whether artists in particularity seek out hard times the way flowers turn their faces toward the sun.”

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

“I love her, and that's the beginning and end of everything.”

“The purpose of life on earth is that the soul should grow - So Growl By doing what is right.”

“Nobody has ever measured even poets how much a heart can hold.”

“I don't want to live-I want to love first and live incidentally.”

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

“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 ready to continue.”

“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.”