But, though I was very much in lust with him, I knew from the start we were nothing like "forever." Maybe because forever is such a scary place.

Real love finds you once, if you're lucky.

Do you ever dangle your toes over the precipice, dare the cliff to crumble, defy the frozen deity to suffer the sun, thaw feather and bone, take wing to fly you home?

God wasn't love, couldn't be love. Because for me, love was a corpse.

In my limited realm of experience, beginnings led to endings.

Something stirred beneath my skin, some being inside I'd only suspected existed, demon or angel, I couldn't say.

in a woman's womb.another chance.to make the world better.

I had never kissed a boy, had never even considered that I might enjoy such an unclean thing, until literature opened my eyes.

Hurt. Enough to want to make someone else hurt too.

I felt angry, frustrated.I felt I didn't belong, not in my, church, not in my home, not in my skin.

Honesty. Sobriety. My virginity. No way to regain the first two, I almost gave away the last.

By all means continue destroying my possessions. I daresay I have too many.

Because when you’re really scared to do something … do it right away.

What makes the earth feel like Hell is our expectation that it ought to feel like Heaven.

The cheap but simple human emotion of envy is the driving force of all socialism, of all anti-capitalist philosophy. It is the mark of the intellectual.

Ah, how often I've cursed those foolish pages, That showed my youthful sufferings to everyone! If Werther had been my brother, and I'd killed him, His sad ghost could hardly have persecuted me more.

You are never to lose sight of nature; the instant you do, you are all abroad, at the mercy of every gust of fashion, without knowing or seeing the point to which you ought to steer.

Yalena: Could you always open your door? Kiki: Yes. Fence, too. Yalena Why don't you? Kiki: Hay sweet. Fresh water. Peppermints.

The takings clause of the Fifth Amendment is for conservatives what the equal protection clause of the 14th is for liberals.

I wanted to get out of Mississippi in the worst way. Go back? What I want to go back for?

I don't want you leaving laughing, I want to leave you shaking. That to me is true horror.