“But something that never escapes me as I putter about the garden, physically and mentally: desire and curiosity inform the inevitable boundaries of the garden, and boundaries, especially when they are an outgrowth of something as profound as the garden with all its holy restrictions and admonitions, must be violated.”

“Something settiled inside me, something heavy and hard. It stayed there, and i could not think of one thing to make it go away. I thought, So this must be living, this must be the beginning of the time people later refer to as 'years ago, when I was young'.”

“My unhappiness was something deep inside me, and when i closed my eyes i could even see it. it sat somehwere - maybe in my belly, maybe in my heart; i could not exactly tell - and it took the shape of a small black ball, all wrapped up in cobwebs. i would look at it and look at it until i had burned the cobwebs away, and then i would see that the ball was no bigger than a thimble, even though it weighed worlds. at that moment, just when i saw its size and felt its weight, i was beyond feeling sorry for myself, which is to say i was beyond tears. i could only just sit and look at myself, feeling like the oldest person who had ever lived and who had not learned a single thing.”

“The inevitable is no less a shock just because it is inevitable.”

“Friendship is a simple thing, and yet complicated; friendship is on the surface, something natural, something taken for granted, and yet underneath one could find worlds.”

“The space between the idea of something and its reality is always wide and deep and dark. The longer they are kept apart—idea of thing, reality of thing—the wider the width, the deeper the depth, the thicker and darker the darkness.”

“I did not care about being a virgin and had long been looking forward to the day when I could rid myself of that status, but when I saw how much it mattered to him to be the first boy I had been with, I could not five him such a hold over me.”