“Garbo is lonely. She always has been and she always will be. She lives in the core of a vast aching aloneness. She is a great artist, but it is both her supreme glory and her supreme tragedy that art is to her the only reality. The figures of living men and women, the events of everyday existence, move about her, shadowy, unsubstantial. It is only when she breathes the breath of life into a part, clothes with her own flesh and blood the concept of a playwright, that she herself is fully awake, fully alive.”

“She has a fascination with Mayan prophecies, and she's writing a book that's sort of her remembrance of her past incarnation. Whatever she applies herself to, she makes it this beautiful, glorious world around her. All of us kids have always been artistic because of her influence.”

“Protima Gauri (as she renamed herself) had zest for living. She loved her men, her liquor and drugs. She had a large range of her lovers, most of whom she names.”

“She existed in her friends; there she was. All the parts of herself she'd forgotten. She knew herself best when she was with them.”

“she held her breath, and in her head, counted seconds. She pretended that for each second she didn’t breathe, God would grant her another day”

“He promised her that he would give her everything, everything she wanted, as men in love always do. And she trusted him despite herself, as women in love always do.”

“The stereotype is the Eternal Feminine. She is the sexual object sought by all men, and all women. She is of neither sex for she herself has no sex at all. Her value is solely attested by the demand she excites in others. All she must contribute is her existence. She need achieve nothing, for she is the reward of achievement. She need never give positive evidence of her moral character because virtue is assumed from her loveliness, and her passivity.”

“If her breath were as terrible as her terminations, there were no living near her, she would infect to the north star!”

“And yet she had never felt so bereft, as if her presence in other lives were entirely illusory, as if she herself were a kind of facsimile, pleasant but inauthentic. Before she got too old she must wrest some part of her life for herself, or she would fade, vanish, before anyone noticed her disappearance”

“she tapped her finger and nothing happened and she thought she had lost her magic, but it had only changed and it took her awhile to figure it out.”