“My mother said the cure for thinking too much about yourself was helping somebody who was worse off than you.”

“Very few people do this any more. It's too risky. First of all, it's a hell of a responsibility to be yourself. It's much easier to be somebody else or nobody at all.”

“Yet I liked him too much… way too much, and I ripped him out of my heart so it wouldn’t get to hurt me more than it did. Oh, he’s magnetic, he’s charming; you could fall into his eyes. Let’s face it: his sex appeal was unbearably strong. I wanted to know him—- the thoughts, the ideas behind the handsome, confident, wisecracking mask… then the friction increased, centered. His nearness was electric in itself. ‘Can’t you see,’ he said. ‘I want to kiss you.’ So he kissed me, hungrily, his eyes shut, his hand warm, curved burning into my stomach. ‘I wish I hated you,’ I said”

“If you love her", I said, "you'll love somebody else someday.”

“That afternoon my mother had brought me the roses."Save them for my funeral," I'd said.”

“Now, lying on my back in bed, I imagined Buddy saying, ‘Do you know what a poem is, Esther?’‘No, what?’ I would say.‘A piece of dust.’Then just as he was smiling and starting to look proud, I would say, ‘So are the cadavers you cut up. So are the people you think you’re curing. They’re dust as dust as dust. I reckon a good poem lasts a whole lot longer than a hundred of those people put together.’ And of course Buddy wouldn’t have any answer to that, because what I said was true. People were made of nothing so much as dust, and I couldn’t see that doctoring all that dust was a bit better than writing poems people would remember and repeat to themselves when they were unhappy or sick and couldn’t sleep.”

“I like you, but not too much. I don’t want to like anybody too much.”