"The role of a writer is not to say what we all can say, but what we are unable to say."

"I, with a deeper instinct, choose a man who compels my strength, who makes enormous demands on me, who does not doubt my courage or my toughness, who does not believe me naive or innocent, who has the courage to treat me like a woman."

"I will not be just a tourist in the world of images, just watching images passing by which I cannot live in, make love to, possess as permanent sources of joy and ecstasy."

"I wept because from now on I will weep less. I wept because I have lost my pain and I am not yet accustomed to its absence."

"I hate men who are afraid of women's strength."

"A voice that had traversed the centuries, so heavy it broke what it touched, so heavy I feared it would ring in me with eternal resonance, a voice rusty with the sound of curses and the hoarse cries that issue from the delta in the last paroxysm of orgasm."

"In this instant of danger they realized they were each other's reason for living, and into this instant they threw their whole being."

"We are punctual, a stressed, marked characteristic. We need order around us, in the house, in the life, although we live by irresistible impulses, as if the order in the closets, in our papers, in our books, in our photographs, in our souvenirs, in our clothes could preserve us from chaos in our feelings, loves, in our work. Indifference to food, sobriety; but this, we admit, is the part of the war against a threatening fragility."

"I wept because I could not believe anymore and I love to believe. I can still love passionately without believing. That means I love humanly. I wept because from now on I will weep less. I wept because I have lost my pain and I am not yet accustomed to its absence."

"Warmth, perfume, rugs, soft lights, books. They do not appease me. I am aware of time passing, of all the world contains that I have not seen, of all the interesting people I have not met."

"In America the vast spaces accentuate the vast spaces between people, deserts which stretch between human beings. It is a void which has to be spanned by the automobile. It takes an hour to reach a movie, two hours to reach a friend. So the coyotes howl and wail at the awful emptiness of mountains, deserts, hills."

"When we blindly adopt a religion, a political system, a literary dogma, we become automatons. We cease to grow."

"We travel, some of us forever, to seek other states, other lives, other souls."

"I reserve the right to love many different people at once, and to change my prince often."

"There were silences in my head. I could abandon myself completely to the pleasure of multiple relationships, to the beauty of the day, to the joys of the day. It was as if a cancer in me had ceased gnawing me. The cancer of introspection."

"They clutch and cling and howl when I leave them, but how badly they love."

"She had acquired some of his gypsy ways, some of his nonchalance, his bohemian indiscipline. She had swung with him into the disorders of strewn clothes, spilled cigarette ashes, slipping into bed all dressed, falling asleep thus, indolence, timelessness...A region of chaos and moonlight. She liked it there."

"One does not learn to suffer less but to dodge pain."

"We write to taste life twice, in the moment and in retrospect."

"Of course, you'll defend Jay," says Rango, He was a part of your former life, of your former values. I will never be able to alter that. I want you to think as I do.""But Rango, you couldn't respect someone who surrendered an opinion merely to please you . It would be hypocrisy."

"Life shrinks or expands in proportion to one's courage."

"I was stirred only like a leaf in the wind, that is all. . ."

"We are going to the moon that is not very far. Man has so much farther to go within himself."

"You are that to me, an oasis. You drug me and at the same time you give me strength."

"The potion drunk by lovers is prepared by no one but themselves. The potion is the sum of one's whole existence."

"Then I realized the vital necessity of art. Human life, yes, you nurse people, you clean house, you market, but then comes the moment of solace and flight. i sit and write and summon other friends, other forms of life, other experiences, and the voyage and the exploration, the delving into character, the vast expanse of life's possibilities and potentialities, contemplation of future travels, of dazzling friendships, all this then makes the chores and the sacrifices beautiful because they are diverted toward some beautiful aim, they become part of the structure of a work of art."

"How wrong it is for a woman to expect the man to build the world she wants, rather than to create it herself."

"The possession of knowledge does not kill the sense of wonder and mystery. There is always more mystery."

"We speak of the masculine and the feminine, but they are the wrong labels. It is really more a matter of poetry versus intellectualization."

"Life is a process of becoming, a combination of states we have to go through. Where people fail is that they wish to elect a state and remain in it. This is a kind of death."

"Stories are the only enchantment possible, for when we begin to see our suffering as a story, we are saved."

"How well I know with what burning intensity you live. You have experienced many lives already, including several you have shared with me- full rich lives from birth to death, and you just have to have these rest periods in between."

"The dream was always running ahead of me. To catch up, to live for a moment in unison with it, that was the miracle."

"One discovers that destiny can be diverted, that one does not have to remain in bondage to the first wax imprint made on childhood sensibilities. Once the deforming mirror has been smashed, there is a possibility of wholeness. There is a possibility of joy."

"Although I was so big, and so rough in many ways, loved hunting, fighting, horseback riding, I loved the piano above everything else...The mountain man's obsession is to get a glimpse of the sea."

"I want to do things so wild with you that I don't know how to say them."

"I believe that men are generally still a little afraid of the dark though the witches are all hung, and Christianity and candles have been introduced."

"At five o'clock Paris always has a current of eroticism in the air."

"We do not escape into philosophy, psychology, and art--we go there to restore our shattered selves into whole ones."

"And in his eyes he had the look of the cat who inspires a desire to caress but loves no one, who never feels he must respond to the impulses he arouses."

"I am sure you would not understand if I told you my father is delightfully clear and selfish, tender and lying, formal and incurable. He exhausts all the loves given to him. If I did not leave his house at night to warm myself in Rango's burning hands I would die at my task, arid and barren, sapless, while my father monologues about his past, and I yawn yawn yawn..."

"Music melts all the separate parts of our bodies together."

"There are many ways to be free. One of them is to transcend reality by imagination, as I try to do."

"No moment of charm without long roots in the past, no moment of charm is born on bare soil, a careless accident of beauty, but is the sum of great sorrows, growths, and efforts."

"I'm restless. Things are calling me away. My hair is being pulled by the stars again."

"There is a perfection in everything that cannot be owned."

"Dreams pass into the reality of action. From the actions stems the dream again; and this interdependence produces the highest form of living."

"I hate rarely, though when I hate, I hate murderously."

"Her presence had awakened in him a man suddenly whipped by his earlier ideals, whose lost manhood wanted to assert itself in action."

"Djuna had wanted a life of desire and freedom, not luxury but beauty, not security but fulfillment, not perfection but a perfect moment like this one..."