“Nothing seems true today except the death of the goldfish who used to make love at ninety kilometers an hour in the pool. The maid has given him a Christian burial. To the worms! To the worms!”

“During the nuit blanche I think: Henry, my love, I can love you better now that you cannot hurt me. I can love you more gaily. More loosely. I can endure space and distance and betrayals. Only the best, the best and the strongest. Henry, my love, the wanderer, the artist, the faithless one who has loved me so well. Believe me, nothing has changed in me toward you except my courage. I cannot walk with one love ever. My head is strong, my head, but to walk, to walk into love I need miracles, the miracles of excess, and white heat, and two-ness! Lie here, breathing into my hair, over my neck. No hurt will come from me. No criticalness, no judgment. I bear you in my womb.”

“The truly faithless one is the one who makes love to only a fraction of you. And denies the rest.”

“I, with a deeper instinct, choose a man who compels my strength, who makes enormous demands on me, who does not doubt my courage or my toughness, who does not believe me naïve or innocent, who has the courage to treat me like a woman.”

“His theatre was the clouds, where no spectacle repeated itself. On land he was a foreigner. Land for him was stasis, and it pulled him into immobility, which was his image of death.”— ,”

“Why do I doubt her? Perhaps she is just very sensitive, and hypersensitive people are false when others doubt them; they waver. And one thinks them insincere. Yet I want to believe her. At the same time it does not seem so very important that she should love me. It is not her role. I am so filled with my love of her. And at the same time I feel that I am dying. Our love would be death. The embrace of imaginings.”

“Anxiety is love's greatest killer. It makes others feel as you might when a drowning man holds on to you. You want to save him, but you know he will strangle you with his panic.”