“She had been born for this man, and she had spent so many years trying to accept the fact that he had been born for someone else…”

“They had met at a club fifteen years before, Etta and Magnus. He had convinced her to dance with him, and she said she had been in love by the end of the song. He told her he had been in love before the beginning.”

“She hated that she was still so desperate for a glimpse of him, but it had been this way for years.”

“Vivian stared. Never had she seen a boy with such long hair! In fact, she had a vague notion that boys were born with their hair short back and sides and only girls had hair that grew long.”

“She had never imagined she had the power to make someone else so happy. And not a magical power, either--a purely human one.”

“Society has been hoodwinked into accepting many lies, and one of the greatest is that homosexuals are 'born that way.' If that is true, we were all born homosexuals. As we developed, we all had the capacity to be a homosexual.”

“Had she been in town, the two of them would have spent most of the day together, and she didn't want that. Then again, deep down, it was exactly what she wanted, leaving her more confused that she'd been in years.”

“One young lady asserted that she had never looked at any of the cards in the cars in which she had been riding for years. When questioned further, it appeared that she knew by heart almost every advertisement appearing on the line (Chicago and Evanston line), and that the goods advertised had won her highest esteem. She was not aware of the fact that she had been studying the advertisements, and flatly resented the suggestion that she had been influenced by them. Some of the goods advertised were known to her only by these advertisements, yet she supposed that they had nothing to do with her esteem of the goods. She supposed that she had always known them, that they were used in her home, or that they had been recommended to her. She did not remember when she had first heard of them.”

“When she looked at him now, she couldn't help thinking that the man he had become bore so little resemblance to the boy he had been. His smile was the only piece of baggage he had carried with him from boyhood into manhood.”

“If I had been born 10 years earlier, I don’t think I would be an animator.”