“I am retiring. I have a mission, and it is coming to an end … France may still one day need an image that is pure. She must be left this image. If Joan of Arc had married, she would no longer have been Joan of Arc.”

“Had I left those images hidden in the emotions, I might have been torn to pieces by them.”

“I am not trying to say that there was a single origin of the Christian savior Jesus Christ, and that origin is pure myth; rather, I am saying that there may indeed have been such a myth, and that if so, it eventually flowed together with other Jesus images, some one of which may actually have been based on a historical Jesus the Nazorean.”

“May the day when you need courage never come.
Even as she said it, though, she knew the day would come.”

“I would have given it up--all of it up--to be married to you for a day. A day that would never have come. You are a reminder--a reminder of everything I am losting. The Life I will not have.”

“I can no longer think what I want to think. My thoughts have been replaced by moving images.”

“As far as I know, he never asked where she had been or why she had left and she never told. I guess some stories do not need telling.”

“She had run down and down and down, and had at last reached a point where medicines no longer had any helpful effect upon her. I said I knew I could put her upon her feet in a week. It brightened her up, it filled her with hope, and she said she would do everything I told her to do. So I said she must stop swearing and drinking, and smoking and eating for four days, and then she would be all right again. And it would have happened just so, I know it; but she said she could not stop swearing, and smoking, and drinking, because she had never done those things. So there it was. She had neglected her habits, and hadn’t any. Now that they would have come good, there were none in stock. She had nothing to fall back on. She was a sinking vessel, with no freight in her to throw overboard and lighten ship withal.”

“I know a girl who just looks at her face in the medicine cabinet mirror and never looks below her shoulders, and she's four or five hundred pounds but she doesn't see all that, she just sees a beautiful face and therefore she thinks she's a beauty. And therefore, I think she's a beauty, too, because I usually accept people on the basis of their self-images, because their self-images have more to do with the way they think than their objective-images do.”

“You need to look like a lady at the Oscars. Otherwise, Joan Rivers will tear you apart. Then again, you aren't really anyone till Joan Rivers tears you apart.”