“Nice feelings are for people who have money to live as they please. If I had ten thousand a year, or even five, I would snap my fingers at all men, and say, 'No, I make my life as I choose, and shall cultivate knowledge and books, and indulge in beautiful ideas of honor and exalted sentiments, and perhaps one day succumb to a noble passion.”

“She looked like green rhubarb juice, and he had the expression of 'Damn!' all over him.”

“Romance is the glamour which turns the dust of everyday life into a golden haze. ”

“The minds of some human beings are as moles, grubbing in the earth for worms. They have no eyes to see God's sky with the stars in it.”

“That's how it was on Irving Circle and how I was raised: You made the best out of what was within reach, which meant friendships engineered by parents and by the happenstance of housing. I stayed with it because we both had queenly older sisters who rarely condescended to play with us, because Shelley was adopted and I was not, because Shelley had Clue and Life, and I did not”

“I was, being human, born alone;I am, being woman, hard beset;I live by squeezing from a stoneThe little nourishment I get.”

“all good books are bad!”