Of course, I know there’s no such thing as a happy ending, but this did seem like a nice change. And since change is all anyone can count on, nice ones are a prize above rubies.

By the time dawn came and I was nearly finished with his book, I was in love with him. And I was in love with his book, which I felt I could have written myself. Which is one of the troubles with writing; people who love your writing already think they’re you. They think if they sat down and wrote, it would be your book. Exactly what I thought

It’s only temporary: you either die, or get better. —Something we used to say about life in general, feeling sophisticated and amusing in bars, back in the days when we thought how you behaved was the fault of other people.

It had been a long, long time since any of these kinds of people had been in my life, being the square that I now am and being on strict orders from my therapist to only hang around with people who love me and treat me well—in fact, once I began to make sure only sweetness and light got a foot in the door, men who were horrible ceased to thrill me

“Can’t you see,” he said, “that life is too short to be miserable? You have to be with people who love you. The people who care about you. You are too fabulous, darling, to be miserable!”

Still, if you ask me, some parts are just as beautiful as my dream version—even more beautiful if you subscribe to the Tennessee Williams decadence-as-poetry theory that ravaged radiance is even better than earnest maintenance.

I’ve always noticed that once you let your looks take over your life, you’re going to spend all the livelong day talking about being too fat, having the wrong hair, and otherwise reducing yourself to the most sluglike common denominator—and if you ask me, someone looking back on the middle class of America during the twentieth century might be

men who could dance couldn’t talk, and men who could talk, hated dancing.

Extreme weariness can make you rise above a lot of things that youthful exuberance would have tossed one into headlong, like shooting the rapids over Niagara Falls.