“But Iris walks through the project every day. Alice asked, "Isn't it dangerous?" Iris said, "I don't know. I guess it could be, if you're afraid. I'm not because it's just something I've always done. I mean, if you live in it you aren't scared of it.”

“Marry me,' he said. [...]'No,' she said. 'It scares me.' [...] 'What aspect of it scares you?' 'The loneliness.”

“Well, I mean I have forgotten how to go anywhere alone. There are things you have to do. Like throw money into a toll basket on a highway. I'd pull up to it now and panic. Or what if I had to hail a cab? It's hard to believe, but I used to be able to do things when I was twenty that are impossible now [...] It's more than the physical task. It's ...a vision of yourself. If you don't see yourself as being able to do it, then you can't, no matter how easy it is.”

“It dawned on him that the loneliness of marriage, the thing Alice had so feared, starts out of love itself, which can never deliver on its promises.”

“You can't drown yourself that simply. All good suicides involve speed and irreversibility, because the body will always move to protect itself against the sicko mind trying to do it in.”

“I wanted him to be a poet. I wanted him to adventure out into the world and learn its ways, not losing himself in the jumble of life but seeing it in the poet's eye, and withdrawing after in the library room where he could write his poems of revelation. He would tell what he had seen. He never wrote a word in his life. But he did see.”

“When people say they are happy for you it may mean they are sad for themselves.”