“Here is my recipe for a mood enhancer. Take a friend, preferably one with a really annoying fringe and outsize pants, and when she is rambling on swiftly, push her into a ditch and run away.”

“I knew her well enough to understand that when Delia pushed you away, it was her way of making sure she didn't get shoved first.”

“She waits for me at night, she waits for me in silence.
She gives me all her tenderness and takes away my pain.
And so far she hasn't run, though I swear she's had her moments.
She still believes in miracles while others cry in vain.”

“Just leave her alone. You're annoying her.'
'I'm not annoying her. She doesn't even know how to be annoyed. She's, what, a week old?'
'She's three months.'
'She's three months in our years, but what is she in baby years?”

“She didn't know whether she was running away from something or running to something, but she admitted that deep in her heart she wanted to go home.”

“Whenever I see her, we laugh enough to last for the month. She's my best friend, and someday when we're old enough I'm going to talk her into staying here forever.”

“Been drinking 3 weeks in a row just to forget
About the pain and the tears and the shame and the fears
And I blame her for these but she ain’t really here
She walked away”

“He's just a contact of hers, which is not the same as a friend. While she was in the hospital she decided that most of her friends were really just contacts.”

“My mother and I have this really strangely close relationship. No other relationship can come close to it. It's frightening. Even when I'm in a relationship with a man, I compare it to my relationship with my mother. She is a friend, but she is still a mother, and everything a mother needs to be, she is. She is really observing and caring and doesn't want anything but giving because it's her joy. Even when I can't bear anybody, not even myself, she 's like the sun coming up to me. She dedicated all her life to me. Sometimes I feel that she gave her life to me and now it's my job to maybe take her somewhere. But what is it she doesn't know? She knows things I couldn't begin to know. Yet she is so fresh with ideas which I already take for granted. She sometimes wakes me up and says, 'Don't you see?”

“I would pick them when they bloomed. And when she called me home for supper, I'd place them in her hair and the contrast would take my breath away.”