“Yes, I want to tell her, and maybe I even do say that, but I am crying because whatever gifts, the pieces of good buried inside and under so much that I feel is bad, is wrong, is twisted, are less clear than the ability to hit a ball with a bat and break the scoreboard or do a triple pirouette in the air on ice. My gifts are for life itself, for an unfortunately astute understanding of all the cruelty and pain in the world. My gifts are unspecific. I am an artist manque, someone full of crazy ideas and grandiloquent needs and even a little bit of happiness, but with no particular way to express it. I am like the title character in the film Betty Blue, the woman who is so full of...so full of...so full of something or other-it is unclear what, but a definite energy that can't find its medium-who pokes her own eyes out with a scissors and is murdered by her lover in an insane asylum in the end. She is, and I am becoming, a complete waste. So I cry at the end of The Natural.”

“I am so tired of the girl in the infirmary, I am so sick of the girl who cries wolf all the time - even though not one of those cries was ever a false alarm. Not one of my pleas was ever less than truly urgent because when it's all in your mind, there always IS a wolf.”

“My mind is, to use a disgustingly obvious simile, like a wastebasket full of waste paper; bits of hair, and rotting apple cores. I am feeling depressed from being exposed to so many lives, so many of them exciting, new to my realm of experience. I pass by people, grazing them on the edges, and it bothers me. I've got to admire someone to really like them deeply - to value them as friends. It was that way with Ann: I admired her wit, her riding, her vivacious imagination - all the things that made her the way she was. I could lean on her as she leaned on me. Together the two of us could face anything - only not quite anything, or she would be back. And so she is gone, and I am bereft for awhile. But what do I know of sorrow?”

“I want to break something, or hit something, but I am afraid to move, so I start crying instead.”

“I guess I should be thankful. Full of thank. But what is thank? I can't eat thank, so I know my stomach isn't full of thank. I can't smell or breathe thank, so I know my lungs aren't full of thank. I'm not even sure how much thank I could fit in the trunk of my car. But I do know one thing. It's much easier to give thanks than something that actually costs money to give.”

“I think, therefore I am, said a man whose mother quickly hit him on the head, saying, I hit my son on the head, therefore I am.No no, you've got it all wrong, cried the man.So she hit him on the head again and cried, therefore I am.You're not, not that way; you're supposed to think, not hit, cried the man.. . . I think, therefore I am, said the man.I hit, therefore we both are, the hitter and the one who gets hit, said the man's mother.But at this point the man had ceased to be; unconscious he could not think. But his mother could. So she thought, I am, and so is my unconscious son, even if he doesn't know it . . .”