“The future rose up ahead of her, a succession of empty days, each more daunting and unknowable than the one before her.”

“They learned to hate her unknowability, her untouchability, the collage of her.”

“You’ll know her more by your questions than by her answers. Keep looking at her long enough. One day you might see someone you know.”

“There are, he assures her, no such things as curses. There is luck, maybe, bad or good. A slight inclination of each day towards success or failure. But no curses.”

“A pioneer is not someone who makes her own soap. She is one who takes up her burdens and walks toward the future.”

“She was a young person whose reveries never were in retrospect. For her past was no treasury of distinct memories, all hoarded and classified, some brighter than others and more highly valued. All memories were for her but as the motes in one fused radiance that followed her and made more luminous the pathway of her future.”

“The woman is perfected
Her dead

Body wears the smile of accomplishment,
The illusion of a Greek necessity

Flows in the scrolls of her toga,
Her bare

Feet seem to be saying:
We have come so far, it is over.

Each dead child coiled, a white serpent,
One at each little

Pitcher of milk, now empty.
She has folded

Them back into her body as petals
Of a rose close when the garden

Stiffens and odors bleed
From the sweet, deep throats of the night flower.

The moon has nothing to be sad about,
Staring from her hood of bone.

She is used to this sort of thing.
Her blacks crackle and drag.”

“Religion exalts mystery as an unknowable secret that must be sealed in glass like the corpse of an enchanted princess and fearfully worshipped from afar. Initiation, on the other hand, requires direct participation and demands each of us to smash the casket and press mad lips to mystery, wooing her as a lover who will offer up her treasurers in a succession of sweet surrenders. This she will do, but only in exact ratio to our evolving ability and worthiness to receive them.”

“She was disappearing a little more each day, so thin, so frail, a wisp of smoke. One day she would surely vanish altogether, and there was no way to stop her.”

“To be loved to madness--such was her great desire. Love was to her the one cordial which could drive away the eating loneliness of her days. And she seemed to long for the abstraction called passionate love more than for any particular lover.”