conflicting emotions Quotes

“Something about the idea of a tower that headed straight down played with a twinned sensation of vertigo and a fascination with structure.”

“I’m afraid I’m in love with you,’ said Dick, ‘and that’s not the best thing that could happen”

“She found herself looking at Lane as if he were a stranger, or a poster advertising a brand of linoleum, across the aisle of a subway car. Again she felt the trickle of disloyalty and guilt, which seemed to be the order of the day, and reacted to it by reaching over to cover Lane’s hand with her own. She withdrew her hand almost immediately and used it to pick her cigarette out of the ashtray. ”

“She let out a laugh, and then she put her hand over her mouth, like she was angry at herself for forgetting her sadness.”

“I see it all raving before me the endless yakking kitchen mouthings of life, the long dark grave of tomby talks under midnight kitchen bulbs, in fact it fills me with love to realize that life so avid and misunderstood nevertheless reaches out skinny skeleton hand to me and to Billie too -- But you know what I mean. And this is the way it begins.”

“without any assistance or guidance from you i have loved you assiduously for 8 months 2 wks & a day i have been stood up four times i’ve left 7 packages on yr doorstep forty poems 2 plants & 3 handmade notecards i left town so i cd send to you have been no help to me on my job you call at 3:00 in the mornin on weekdays so i cd drive 27 1/2 miles cross the bay before i go to work charmin charmin but you are of no assistance i want you to know this waz an experiment to see how selifsh i cd be if i wd really carry on to snare a possible lover if i waz capable of debasin my self for the love of another if i cd stand not being wanted when i wanted to be wanted & i cannot so with no further assistance & no guidance from you i am endin this affair this note is attached to a plant i’ve been waterin since the day i met you you may water it yr damn self”

“I hate him. I hate him for being so brutal. I hate that I’m beholden to him. I hate that I’m in love with his wife and something damned close to that with the elephant. And most of all, I hate that I’ve let them both down.”

“It was as if being here had some kind of narcotic effect on me; like the loop itself was a drug—a mood enhancer and a sedative combined—and if I stayed too long, I’d never want to leave. ”

“This is their home. I have tried to make it as fine a place as I could. But the plain fact is they cannot leave, and I’d appreciate it if you didn’t make them want to.”

“And the closer she was, the further apart she wanted to be. She just could not get it together, until she met him. Hate is heavy.”

“If you find yourself feeling unparalleled happiness and unexpected sadness at the same time.”

“She was caught between two allegiances...Herself. Her race.”

“The path ran up a hill. ‘Seem like there is chains about my feet time, I get this far,’ she said, in a voice of argument old people keep to use with themselves. ‘Something always take a hold of me on this hill—pleads I should stay.‘”

“Relief and anguish pulse heavily in my blood. I’ve wanted to see him every day. But also, I never wanted to see him again.”

“There was nothing worse than having to feel sorry for people who had wronged you. You don’t want lottery wins for your enemies, but you don’t want tragedies for them either.”

“It is hard to explain the savagery of hope.”

“He knew that most young men made nothing at all of giving a pretty girl a kiss, and he remembered that the night before, when he had put his arm about Mattie, she had not resisted. But that had been out-of-doors, under the open irresponsible night. Now, in the warm lamplit room, with all its ancient implications of conformity and order, she seemed infinitely farther away from him and more unapproachable.”

“I was really thinking of killing him, wiping him off the earth, and it was then I realized for the first time that if it was necessary to kill them, then I would kill them, and something at the same time said: you cannot be utterly right.”