“Mostly, I could tell, I made him feel uncomfortable. He didn't understand me, and he was sort of holding it against me. I felt the urge to reassure him that I was like everybody else, just like everybody else. But really there wasn't much point, and I gave up the idea out of laziness.”

“I wished I could have made him stay, to explain that I wanted things between us to be good, not so that he'd defend me better but, if I can put it this way, good in a natural way. Mostly, I could tell, I made him feel uncomfortable. He didn't understand me, and he was sort of holding it against me. I felt the urge to reassure him that I was like everybody else, just like everybody else. But really there wasn't much point, and I gave up the idea out of laziness.”

“I felt the urge to reassure him that I was like everybody else, just like everybody else.”

“Where do I get my ideas from? You might as well have asked that of Beethoven. He was goofing around in Germany like everybody else, and all of a sudden this stuff came gushing out of him. It was music. I was goofing around like everybody else in Indiana, and all of a sudden stuff came gushing out. It was disgust with civilization.”

“No one else should see him like that, ever. Not my Rue. And he was mine, as much as I was his. I knew that now, just from the way he looked at me after I kissed him. Everything I felt for him, every ounce of yearning and desire and need, had shone out of his eyes as he stared up at me. And I knew right then, I knew… he belonged to me.”

“Besides, I hated him but I loved him too. Yes. I know all about that sort of thing. Christ, I should, I'd heard nothing else my last two years in New York. 'They have this terrific love-hate thing going,' everybody said about everybody else. 'You watch, it's going to destroy them-.' But never about me. When I took to someone I took to them, and when I took against them ditto. Mostly I felt indifference.”