“When she was a girl nobody had money but people had dreams.”

“And when she dreams, she dreams of a girl who was lost at sea but one day found the shore.”

“It was like she was cheated. Only nobody had cheated her. So there was nobody to take it out on. However, just the same she had that feeling. Cheated.”

“When a man comes to love a woman exactly as she had dreamed, she decides he is a weakling.”

“For a split second I felt as though she was nobody special in the larger scheme of my life. She was just some girl who had tied me to her leg to help her sink when she jumped off the bridge. Then I blinked and was in love with her again.”

“Stanley:
Delicate piece she is.
Stella:
She is. She was. You didn't know Blanche as a girl. Nobody, nobody, was tender and trusting as she was. But people like you abused her, and forced her to change.”

“Polly saw the point. Would she wish not to have been born? Unhappy as she was, she could not say that. Even when she had wished to die, she had not wished never to have been born. Nobody alive could do that.”

“I once had a girl, or should I say she once had me.”

“All she wanted was to be a little girl, to be efficiently taken care of by some yielding yet superior power, stupider and steadier than herself. It seemed that the only lover she had ever wanted was a lover in a dream”

“She had never dreamed there could be so much pain in a life when there was nothing physically wrong. She hurt all the time.”