“I needed her to stop. Needed not to hear the pain in her voice--to see the way she was twisting the pocketbook strap. If she kept talking, she might break down and tell me everything.”

“She's gonna listen to her heart.
It's gonna tell her what to do.
She might need a lot of loving,
But she don't need you.”

“She needed to talk, she needed to cry, she needed to vent all her frustrations and disappointments.”

“She would go right through a stop signal if no cars were around, and when anyone got in her way she would smash her palm on the squealing horn and hold it there. The sound rose like a cry of help through the canyons of buildings. She kept doing this, no matter whether she needed it or not.”

“It wasn't torpor that kept her - she was often restless to the point of irritability. She simply liked to feel that she was prevented from leaving, that she was needed.”

“She opened her mouth like a firebucket and laughed. That terminated my interest in her. I couldn't hear the laugh but the hole in her face when she unzippered her teeth was all I needed.”

“She with her eyes my heart does bind,
She with her voice might captivate my mind.”

“Staring at him the
way she might stare at a beloved place she
was not sure she would ever see again, trying
to commit the details to memory, to paint
them on the backs of her eyelids that she
might see it when she shut her eyes to sleep.”

“She's a woman in love
And he's gonna break her heart to pieces.
She don't want to see.
She's a woman in love, but it's not me.”

“A compassion swirled form nowhere in the high I was lost in. She needed me. She needed me to accept her for what she was. And when I realized that I had it within myself to give her at least this small part of me, the last of my fear melted away.”