You talk crazy any more and I'll leave. Leave. For Christ's sake leave. She would not take her eyes from the dry wash. All right. Don't, he would say then. Don't. Why do you say those things? Why do...

I remember wishing that I could afford the house, which cost $ 1,000 a month. Someday you will, she said lazily. Someday it all comes. There in the sun on her terrace it seemed easy to believe in...

I wake and feel the fell of dark, not day.

Maria did not particularly believe in rewards, only in punishments, swift and personal.

This is the California where it is possible to live and die without ever eating an artichoke, without ever meeting a Catholic or a Jew. This is the California where it is easy to Dial-A-Devotion, but...

The easiest kind of relationship for me is with ten thousand people," she said. "The hardest is with one.

We all know that if we are to live ourselves there comes a time when we must relinquish the dead, let them go, keep them dead.Let them become the photograph on the table.Let them become the name on...

They come from all over, and they are on the average very young, very earnest, and not very much in touch with the larger scene, less refugees from it than children who do not quite apprehend it.

I hurt the people I cared about, and insulted those I did not. I cut myself off from the one person who was closer to me than any other. I cried until I was not even aware when I was crying and when I...

I have already lost touch with a couple people I used to be.

What kind of magpie keeps this notebook?

Everything that was said to me I seemed to have heard before, and I could no longer listen.

The day's events did not turn on cracked crab. And yet it is precisely that fictitious crab that makes me see the afternoon all over again, a home movie run all too often, the father bearing gifts,...

I was not then guilt-ridden about spending afternoons that way, because I still had all the afternoons in the world.

Some years passed, but I still did not lose that sense of wonder about New York. I began to cherish the loneliness of it, the sense that at any given time no one need know where I was or what I was...

I still believed in possibilities then, still had the sense, so peculiar to New York, that something extraordinary would happen any minute, any day, any month.

I could taste the peach and feel the soft air blowing from a subway grating on my legs and I could smell lilac and garbage and expensive perfume and I knew that it would cost something sooner or later...

Was anyone ever so young? I am here to tell you that someone was.