“The last great escape. I was done gambling, done betting on a ship that would never come in. I would cash in my chips while I was ahead. I didn't want to suffer the growing old, didn't want to wait until my memory went. It was all so tiresome. I would just go out in a blaze of glory before the parasites of sadness got at me and made me bitter. After that's the American way: take your own life before everything else takes it from you.”

“Why did you start to write?I left at 15.. I started to write becase I was taken off a ship from Germany when I was 18. They said I wouldn't live for 6 months.I'd been given up for dead many times and I just didn't want to waste my life. I had what I now realize was a spiritual experience.I realized that I would die,and that just before I would die,two things would happen.number one, I would regret my entire life.and number two, I would want to live my life over again.and then I would die.and that terrified me.[...]to think that I would live my entire life, look at it, and say oh..I blew it. was such a terrifying thoughtthat I bought a typewriterI didn't know what I was going to do with it, but I bought a typewriter.but that is what got me to start writing, wasI did not want to waste my lifeI wanted to, and I HAD to, do something with my life”

“Louise, I would gladly fire the past for you, go and not look back. I have been reckless before, never counting the cost, oblivious to the cost. Now, I've done the sums ahead. I know what it will mean to redeem myself from the accumulations of a lifetime. I know and I don't care. You set before me a space uncluttered by association. It might be a void or it might be a release. Certainly I want to take the risk. I want to take the risk because the life I have stored up is going mouldy.”

“There was life after Joe. There had to be, hadn't there? I just wished that instead of my constantly having to muster every scrap of my strength in order to feel normal, it would happen of its own accord. I didn't want happy. Normal would have done.”

“I am the sum total of everything that went before me, of all I have been seen done, of everything done-to-me. I am everyone everything whose being-in-the-world affected was affected by mine. I am anything that happens after I'm gone which would not have happened if I had not come.”

“But while I'd be their daughter, while I'd eat the roast and come home from dates and wash the dishes, I would also be myself. I would love my mother, but I'd never want to be her again. I would never be what someone else wanted me to be. I would never laugh at a joke I didn't think was funny. I would never tell another lie. I would be the truth-teller, starting today. That would be tough.But I was tougher.”