“Diana got that seventh-sense intimation that she had touched on an unmentionable matter; although a strangely involuted one whereby the fact that it was unmentionable was itself unmentionable.”

“She didn't like the fact that she had reduced a man – no matter how evil he might be—to a drooling idiot.”

“but she realized that she wanted him to know her. She wanted him to understand her, if only because she had strange sense that he was the kind of man she could fall in love with, even if she didn't want to.”

“The fact is that Soviet Leninism, through a process of gradual involution, has taken on more and more of the attributes of paradigmatic Fascism.”

“She never stumbles,
she's got no place to fall.
She's nobody's child,
the law can't touch her at all.”

“It's a strange moment, the moment of creating characters who up to that moment have had no existence. What follows is fitful, uncertain, even hallucinatory, although sometimes it can be an unstoppable avalanche. The author's position is an odd one. In a sense he is not welcomed by his characters. They resist him, they are not easy to live with.”

“She always had been in touch with something outside of human ken. She had something in her no other human had. You sensed it, but you could not name it, for there was no name for this thing she had. And she had fumbled with it, trying to use it, not knowing how to use it, charming off the warts and healing poor hurt butterflies and only God knew what other acts that she performed unseen.”

“In our daily lives we attend primarily to that which the senses are spelling out for us: to what the eyes perceive, to what the fingers touch. Reality to us is thinghood, consisting of substances that occupy space; even God is conceived by most of us as a thing. The result of our thinginess is our blindness to all reality that fails to identify itself as a thing, as a matter of fact.”

“Marriage is not a ritual or an end. It is a long, intricate, intimate dance together and nothing matters more than your own sense of balance and your choice of partner.”

“Radio comes to us ostensibly with person to person directness that is private and intimate, while in more urgent fact, it is really a subliminal echo chamber of magic power to touch remote and forgotten chords.”