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“…The evil was manmade; it wasn’t real.”

“I went upstairs again and sat in my chair thinking about Harry Jones and his story. It seemed a little too pat. It had the austere simplicity of fiction rather than the tangled woof of fact.”

“How could I put across to him how it was with me? How much I was driven timorously by a desire to please and yet found myself stubbornly unable to do so by obedience to any values but my own? Since my values were not shared by those around me, I couldn’t possibly win.”

“I am here to try on a dress, I remind myself. Any Beckett play I’ve managed to wander into is odd weather that will pass.”

“My ability to imagine absurd catastrophes was getting sharper.”

“I could no longer believe in sleep. It didn’t work for me anymore. It was like struggling with my eyes shut. If I had to struggle I would rather struggle with my eyes open.”

At dawn we went through El Paso. It was strange, leaving Texas. I had had no plans to leave it, and didn’t know how I felt. I drove on into New Mexico, Sally still asleep. Then I really felt Texas. It was all behind me, north to south, not lying there exactly, but more like looming there over the car, not a state or a stretch or land but some giant, some genie, some god, towering over the road.

“That composition Mr. Keith praised so highly might well have been a mere string of Japanese platitudes. Could commonplace emotions and unoriginal expressions — the manifestation of a banal literary sensibility — transform into something more remarkable when rendered in a different language?”

"I must, I thought, bring in a newspaper or, better still, a book, to appear to give me some sense of purpose, if I go on having to dine alone. Instinct, or some remnant of a previous existence, told me that being an unaccompanied woman in a public place is no joke: it has to be explained."

"She presides," he said. "She's got a presiding nose. That's how she got where she is. The most casual conversation, not to say trivial, she's got to preside over it. And that's why she never got married and never will, she'd preside over the lovemaking. With a nose like that she can't do anything but preside." - from "Anna Lisa's Nose"

Oh, it was horrible to have a teenager's emotions and a forty-year-old's body. It was humiliating. It was depressing. It was degrading. It made her feel alive to the very tips of her toes.

Sasha does not know what this kind of conversation is called. It is not small talk, and it is not gossip precisely, nor is it deep and meaningful discussion. Dialogue, meeting, palaver, visit - none of them seem quite right. If there is a term, Sasha is unaware of it. She only knows she never wants to be without it in her life. Never, never, never.

Their house became like a tiny sealed-off country, with its own ornate customs and elegantly, ridiculously complicated language, where true news of the outside world was not exactly forbidden, but became more and more impossible to deliver.

Always when people tell you you will have to face this sometime, when they hurry you matter-of-factly towards whatever pain or obscenity or unwelcome revelation is laid out for you, there is this edge of betrayal, this cold, masked, imperfectly hidden jubilation in their voices, something greedy for your hurt. Yes, in parents too; in parents particularly.

The vehemence of my moral indignation surprised me. Was I beginning to have standards and principles, and, oh dear, scruples? What were they, and what would I do with them, and how much were they going to get in my way?

And Georgina Requeni, who is still holding her hand in front of her and has just shouted something, even though she can't remember what, looks around, terrified, as if her own cry had woken her and sees, as one sees the end of a dream, that all the faces are strange and are staring at her. And that the hand stretched out in front of her is the hand of an old woman.

'Well,' said Miss Goering, 'perhaps my maneuvers do seem a little strange, but I have thought for a long time now that often, so very often, heroes who believe themselves to be monsters because they are so far removed from other men turn around much later and see really monstrous acts being committed in the name of something mediocre.'

At a certain point gin takes everything off your hands and you flop around like a little baby. Tonight I want to be a little baby.