“As for sin. I honestly can't believe God is so bored or so lecherous as to care how close my body and its various parts get to someone else's various parts.”

“I am burning. I have to live, I have to sing, I want to transform myself into a thousand different characters and carry their life with me onto the stage where it's so bright and so dark at the same time, just knowing there are three thousand people out there longing to be swept away by the passion that's about to flood out from scarlet curtains, to this I consecrate my body and my soul, I can give no more than all of myself, I feel my heart is a throbbing engine and my voice is the valve, like a wailing train, it has to sing or blow up, there's too much fuel, too much fire, and what am I to do with this voice if I can't let it out, it's not just singing. I am here as a speck, but I don't feel scared or about to be blown away, I feel like all New York is a warm embrace just waiting to enfold me. I am in love. But not with a person. I am passionately in love with my life.”

“Everything in New York is a photograph. All the things that are supposed to be dirty or rough or unrefined are the most beautiful things. Garbage cans at the ends of alleyways look like they've been up all night talking with each other. Doorways with peeling paint look like the wise lines around an old feller's eyes. I stop and stare but can't stay because men always think I'm selling something. Or worse, giving something away. I wish I could be invisible. Or at least I wish I didn't look like someone they want to look at. They stop being part of the picture, they get up from their chess game and come out of the frame at me, blocking my view.”

“She wonders when it was that she began to despair. All these years she mistook it for pious resignation. Now she sees the difference. Such a fine line between a state of grace and a state of mortal sin. What is the good of believing fervently in God if you wind up hating Him?”

“Adelaide believes that all children should have enough grown-ups around who love them so that one can tell them to fight, one can tell them not to, and one can tell them not to worry so much.”

“Hope is a gift. You can't choose to have it. To believe and yet to have no hope is to thirst beside a fountain.”

“What is the good of believing fervently in God if you wind up hating Him?”