“We've had this date with each other from the beginning.”

“Caged birds accept each other, but flight is what they long for.”

“My head don't work any more and it's hard for me to understand how anybody could care if he lived or died or was dying or cared about anything but whether or not there was liquor left in the bottle and so I said what I said without thinking. In some ways I'm no better than the others, in some ways worse because I'm less alive. Maybe it's being alive that makes them lie, and being almost not alive that makes me sort of accidentally truthful--I don't know but--anyway--we've been friends...And being friends is telling each other the truth...”

“Nobody sees anybody truly but all through the flaws of their own egos. That is the way we all see ...each other in life. Vanity, fear, desire, competition-- all such distortions within our own egos-- condition our vision of those in relation to us. Add to those distortions to our own egos the corresponding distortions in the egos of others, and you see how cloudy the glass must become through which we look at each other. That's how it is in all living relationships except when there is that rare case of two people who love intensely enough to burn through all those layers of opacity and see each other's naked hearts.”

“To begin with, I turn back time. I reverse it to that quaint period, the thirties, when the huge middle class of America was matriculating in a school for the blind. Their eyes had failed them, or they had failed their eyes, and so they were having their fingers pressed forcibly down on the fiery Braille alphabet of a dissolving economy.”

“Revolution begins in putting on bright colors.”

“I don't mean what other people mean when they speak of a home, because I don't regard a home as a...well, as a place, a building...a house...of wood, bricks, stone. I think of a home as being a thing that two people have between them in which each can...well, nest.”