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“It ought to make us feel ashamed when we talk like we know what we're talking about when we talk about love.”

“I loved you so much once. I did. More than anything in the whole wide world. Imagine that. What a laugh that is now. Can you believe it? We were so intimate once upon a time I can't believe it now. The memory of being that intimate with somebody. We were so intimate I could puke. I can't imagine ever being that intimate with somebody else. I haven't been.”

“There was a time when I thought I loved my first wife more than life itself. But now I hate her guts. I do. How do you explain that? What happened to that love? What happened to it, is what I'd like to know. I wish someone could tell me.”

“Then I said something. I said, Suppose, just suppose, nothing had ever happened. Suppose this was for the first time. Just suppose. It doesn't hurt to suppose. Say none of the other had ever happened. You know what I mean? Then what? I said.”

“Woke up this morning with a terrific urge to lie in bed all day and read.”

“And what did you want? To call myself beloved, to feel myself beloved on the earth.”

“And did you get what
you wanted from this life, even so?
I did.
And what did you want?
To call myself beloved, to feel myself
beloved on the earth.”

“That's all we have, finally, the words, and they had better be the right ones.”

“But I can hardly sit still. I keep fidgeting, crossing one leg and then the other. I feel like I could throw off sparks, or break a window--maybe rearrange all the furniture.”

“Dreams, you know, are what you wake up from.”

“Honey, no offense, but sometimes I think I could shoot you and watch you kick.”

“You've got to work with your mistakes until they look intended. Understand?”

“there isn't enough of anything
as long as we live. But at intervals
a sweetness appears and, given a chance
prevails.”

“Get in, get out. Don't linger. Go on.”

“Don’t complain, don’t explain.”

“This is awful. I don't know what's going to happen to me or to anyone else in the world.”

“He wondered if she wondered if he were watching her.”

“Something’s died in me,” she goes. “It took a long time for it to do it, but it’s dead. You’ve killed something, just like you’d took an axe to it. Everything is dirt now.”

“I am a cigarette with a body attached to it”

“It's possible, in a poem or short story, to write about commonplace things and objects using commonplace but precise language, and to endow those things—a chair, a window curtain, a fork, a stone, a woman's earring—with immense, even startling power.”

“But he stays by the window, remembering that life. They had laughed. They had leaned on each other and laughed until the tears had come, while everything else—the cold and where he'd go in it—was outside, for a while anyway.”

“There is no answer. It's okay. But even if it wasn't okay, what am I supposed to do?”

“Booze takes a lot of time and effort if you're going to do a good job with it.”

“Happiness. It comes on
unexpectedly. And goes beyond, really,
any early morning talk about it.”

“Every great or even every very good writer makes the world over according to his own specifications.”

“My heart is broken,” she goes. “It’s turned to a piece of stone. I’m no good. That’s what’s as bad as anything, that I’m no good anymore.”

“There was this funny thing of anything could happen now that we realized everything had.”

“My lungs are thick with the smoke of your absence.”

“I am too nervous to eat pie.”