“The most wonderful street in the universe is Broadway. It is a world within itself. High and low, rich and poor, pass along at a rate peculiar to New York, and positively bewildering to a stranger.”

“I was struck by how life moved so fast, almost cruelly, on Broadway. Fiorello! had fled the Broadhurst to make way for Sail Away, as if it had never existed. I studied each such metamorphosis with contradictory emotions of excitement and loss. With their new marquees and posters and glass-encased displays of fresh photos, the theaters promised a teeming bounty of surprises. But there remained not a shred of their previous tenants, who were gone forever and mourned by no one, perhaps, except me. When shows left the National, I knew they were going on to Broadway or at least to another town on the road. Where did the plays that left New York go?”

“What are Americans still buying? Big Macs,Campbell's soup,Hershey's chocolate and Spam--the four food groups of the apocalypse.”

“Some rooftop, water-tank looming, street-racket strangely quelledand other known and unknown there, long sweet summer eveningon the tarred roof:leaned back your head to the nightvault swarming with starsthe Pleiades broken loose, not seven but thousandsevery known constellation flinging out fiery threadsand you could distinguish all-cobwebs, tendrils, anatomies of starscoherently hammocked, blueblack avenues between…It was New York, the dream-sitethe lost city the city of dreadful light…wewent striding the avenues in our fiery hairin our bodies young and ordinary riding the subways readingor pressed against other bodiesfeeling in them the maps of Brooklyn Queens Manhattan…”

“Innocence is a double edged sword - Nothing else can make the world more wonderous or deadly.”

“A lot is being said today about the influence that the myths and images of women have on all of us who are products of culture. I think it has been a peculiar confusion to the girl or woman who tries to write because she is peculiarly susceptible to language. She goes to poetry or fiction looking for her way of being in the world, since she too has been putting words and images together; she is looking eagerly for guides, maps, possibilities; and over and over in the ‘words’ masculine persuasive force’ of literature she comes up against something that negates everything she is about: she meets the image of Woman in books written by men.”

“A faith that moves mountains is a faith that expands horizons, it does not bring us into a smaller world full of easy answers, but into a larger one where there is room for wonder.”