"The idea of an “artistic community” evaporates into the slow days. Inspiration and words like that get hurried along with the fast company; it’s impossible to tell if one’s been inspired, or if it was the cocaine, or what. "

"Work and love—the two best things—flourish in studios. It’s when you have to go outside and define everything that they often disappear."

"I can’t get a thread to go through to the end and make a straightforward novel. I can’t keep everything in my lap, or stop rising flurries of sudden blind meaning. But perhaps if the details are all put together, a certain pulse and sense of place will emerge, and the integrity of empty space with occasional figures in the landscape can be understood at leisure and in full, no matter how fast the company."

"It was a place that was so hot and listless and without character, so flat that mirages of water on the road appeared closer than they did anywhere else I’d ever been. How could a young person want to stay there? It was beyond the realm of possibility."

"The table was long and the food was so American I hadn’t tasted anything like it in I don’t know how long. All these years of diets and yogurt, French cafés, Italian kitchens, Greek food . . . This food was cooked for Americans who worked hard and liked their food simple."

"He reminded me of men in New York who tried to be vegetarians and played record duets by Mozart."

"The Blackboard looked like it might twirl into heaven with just another double tequila."

"From out of the wings he came, an archetypal ex-marine with a Dorothea Lange country girl in his arms, swirling and dipping with such elegance that the room became electric with dance."

"I wonder if I'll ever be able to have what I like or if my tastes are too various to be sustained by one of anything."

"The way he drove a car was the most inexplicable thing about him; he drove with an absent-minded, almost puttering kindliness, as though when he was inside a car, the world got slower; it was time for reverie almost."

"Smoking has been so glamorous for so long, all those matches, those pauses, the lipstick on the tips—the smoke itself curling its casual way through the most nerve-wracking moments. But in another way, smoking, although glamorous, has never been as glamorous as heroin—and dying from cigarettes just doesn’t have the tragic sunset quality that O.D.ing lends to death. Heroin is the celebrated romantic excess of our time."

"Janis Joplin was always wondering when her prince would come, and the wait was such a bore that she purchased total surcease on the smooth, blank, clear, smiling lake of heroin. A famous friend of the famous."

"At just that point, there was a frozen moment. Terry’s gold and silver face seemed stopped in time, a stricken tinge around her mouth as she remembered; the new reddish-violet eye shadow brought out the baby’s feet in her cheeks. Her luminous skin glowed. All was silent, as the face of this heroine clearly revealed its tragic flaw. "

"“Did you see it, it rained!” everyone said to each other, in soft panting voices as though they were in love."

"It seemed to me as we drove down Santa Monica with the liquor-store lights all halos of color that Shawn was enhanced in such a blurry, silver fox of a night. So charming, I thought as the Quaalude came on, it’s all so charming. I felt like a floppy, prize-winning iris, content to be an iris, all lavender and silken, the kind they call True Blue."

"I like hot, searing, bloodless air—so hot that you don’t even have to breathe. "

"She and Shawn gossiped about people they’d known who died in accidents. I knew no one like that. All my friends died on purpose."

"We walked in the rain together when we were girls,” Jo said dreamily. “Nothing will ever replace that."

"It was hard to believe that Beth Nanville had once walked in the rain with Jo, but long ago she must have. Chances are what one remembers."

"I wondered what kind of reputation I had left there that my name would stick in Gabrielle’s mind—the girl from the wrong zone? I always thought I had been invisible at Marshall. "

"But Mary was much better than nuns. They only came in black and white, while Mary was all the colors."

"Women want to be loved like roses. They spend hours perfecting their eyebrows and toes and inventing irresistible curls that fall by accident down the back of their necks from otherwise austere hair-dos. They want their lover to remember the way they held a glass. They want to haunt"

"Men don’t work like that as far as I’ve been able to judge. Men aren’t haunted by the way a woman holds a glass. Men are haunted by women who’re just like the one who married dear old dad"

"Whether he knows or not, cares or not, he is certainly afraid. Whether he is with others or not, he is certainly alone."

"Then the door is before him. There is darkness all around him, there is silence in him. Then the door opens and he stands alone, the whole world falling away from him. And the brief corner of the sky seems to be shrieking, though he does not hear a sound. Then the earth tilts, he is thrown forward on his face in darkness, and his journey begins."

"With this fearful intimation there opened in me a hatred for Giovanni which was as powerful as my love, and which was nourished by the same roots."

"It was the fact that when one began searching for the key to this disorder, one realized that it was not to be found in any of the usual places. For this was not a matter of habit or circumstance or temperament; it was a matter of punishment and grief."

“We fear death, we shudder at life's instability, we grieve to see the flowers wilt again and again, and the leaves fall, and in our hearts we know that we, too, are transitory and will soon disappear."

"I don’t regret not having the child. But sometimes I wish I was the kind of person who would have kept it."

"There's a short moment of confusion as you try to understand what's happening to you. You hear this boy crying in pain somewhere out of shot, the September sky above you is black, but there don't seem to be any stars up there, and the last thing you see is the flash of a camera in your face. The psychic I closes. I ask myself, is that when you knew?"

"Deeper, until it was pointless to search for shorelines because he knew Lucinda would not be standing on them."

“Grief was a hole. A portal to nothing. Grief was a walk so long Hazel forgot her own legs. It was a shock of blinding sun. A burst of remembering: sandals on pavement, a sleepy back seat, nails painted on the bathroom floor. Greif was a loneliness that felt like a planet.”

“Sometimes I think I surround myself with conflict so I have reasons to justify the sadness. That it’s circumstantial. That it doesn’t live deep in my bones."

"It was a nothing that felt like an everything."

“Everything was beautiful and nothing hurt.”