“I entered the water as naked as when my mother bore me. When I first touched the cold water I felt a shudder go through me, then the shudder was transformed into a sensation of wakefulness.”

“Often a cold shudder has run through me, and I have asked myself whether I may have not devoted myself to a fantasy.”

“A few words which he wanted to emphasize were put into brackets or set off by quotation marks. My first impulse was to point out to him that it was ridiculous to put slang words and expressions between quotation marks, for that prevents them from entering the language. But I decided not to. When I received his letters, his parentheses made me shudder. At first, it was a shudder of slight shame, disagreeable. Later (and now, when I reread them) the shudder was the same, but I know, by some indefinable, imperceptible change, that it is a shudder of love- it is both poignant and delightful, perhaps because of the memory of the word shame that accompanied it in the beginning. Those parentheses and quotation marks are the flaw on the hip, the beauty mark on the thigh whereby my friend showed that he was himself, irreplaceable, and that he was wounded.”

“I hate when I'm on a flight and I wake up with a water bottle next to me like oh great now I gotta be responsible for this water bottle”

“I wanted it, then felt guilty for wanting water when my friends were going to kill each other.”

“When I makes tea I makes tea, as old mother Grogan said. And when I makes water I makes water.”