"That was called transplanting yourself....But in the story the boys were drinking and this made me thirsty and I ordered a rum St. James"
"I've seen you, beauty, and you belong to me now, whoever you are waiting for and if I never see you again, I thought. You belong to me and all Paris belongs to me and I belong to this notebook and this pencil."
"Maybe away from Paris I could write about Paris as in Paris I could write about Michigan."
"I was learning something from the painting of Cézanne that made writing simple true sentences far from enough to make the stories have the dimensions that I was trying to put in them."
"There were funny parts always and she liked them and also what the Germans call gallows-humor stories. She wanted to know the gay part of how the world was going; never the real, never the bad."