“...she refuses all amorous alms, and such a refusal, to my view, justifies a theft.”
“She refused to be bored chiefly because she wasn't boring.”
“Life on the streets is short. People look at you in disgust, even the ones who give you alms, but this is nothing compared to the revulsion you feel for yourself. It's like being trapped in a walking corpse, a corpse that's hungry, stinks, and refuses to die.”
“Lying on the ceiling. Refusing to go to school. Not opening up to me. Climbing water towers. "No, she's all right.”
“I sleep. I inhabit sleep firmly, willing it, wielding it, pushing away dreams, refusing, refusing. Sleep is my lover now, my forgetting, my opiate, my oblivion.”
“My mother refuses to go into the ocean. She respects it, she says, which is basically the same as saying she's afraid. I go in because it scares me...”