“for one precious moment, I believed everything she did was because of love. but now love and power are both shouting their names. I wanted it to be so pure. nothing is ever pure.”

“I wanted it to be so pure. Nothing is ever pure.”

“An alder tree can't become an oak at will. A maple can't pick up its roots like legs, and stride, step by powerful step, along the shore to find the sun. And everything that ever said otherwise--all those years of school, and the plays and moving pictures that promise you can be someone else, something more--they were all lies.”

“You come back here, you good-for-nothing! Come help me drag these ailing bones." The old man flees toward the Lethe as fast as his rickety legs will carry him. Like an army scouring the countryside, she surges in his wake, flattening grasses and bushes as she goes. The gap narrows. "Don't you recognize me?" she hollers. "It's me, your sweetie pie!”

“Soil, blood, seed- Let me draw strength from you. let it be enough.”

“Sometimes with one I love, I fill myself with rage, for fear I effuse unreturn'd love; But now I think there is no unreturn'd love—the pay is certain, one way or another; (I loved a certain person ardently, and my love was not return'd; Yet out of that, I have written these songs.) ”

“WHAT am I, after all, but a child, pleas’d with the sound of my own name? repeating it over and over; I stand apart to hear—it never tires me. To you, your name also; Did you think there was nothing but two or three pronunciations in the sound of your name?”