- "...as much as anything else, it was the stare, not so paradoxically, of a privacy-lover who, once his privacy has been invaded, doesn't quite approve when the invader just gets up and leaves, one-two-three, like that."
- "I'm just interested in finding out what the hell goes. I mean do you have to be a goddam bohemian type, or dead, for Chrissake, to be a real poet? What do you want-some bastard with wavy hair?" (19)
- 'Her extended fingers, though trembling, or because they were trembling, looked oddly graceful and pretty." (22)
- "She cried without trying to suppress any of the noisier manifestations of grief and confusion, with all the convulsive throat sounds that a hysterical child makes when the breath is trying to get up through a partly closed epiglottis." (22)
- "To start with, he was a small young man, and extremely slight of body. From the rear - particularly where his vertebrae were visible - he might almost have passed for one of those needy metropolitan children who are sent out every summer to endowed camps to be fattened and sunned." (51)
- "A more general and surely less parochial view was that his face had just been barely saved from too-handsomeness, not to say gorgeousness, by virtue of one's ears protruding slightly more than the other." (51)
- "But what was unmissable, and, as already so flatly suggested, a joy of a kind forever, was an authentic spirit superimposed over his entire face - especially at the eyes, where it was often as arresting as a Harlequin mask, and, on occasion, much more confounding." (52)
- "We're freaks, that's all. Those two bastards got us nice and early and made us into freaks with freakish standards, that's all."
- "If you’re a poet, you do something beautiful. I mean you’re supposed to leave something beautiful after you get off the page and everything. The ones you’re talking about don’t leave a single, solitary thing beautiful."
mar 24 2011 ∞
jun 10 2011 +
jun 10 2011 +