"Can you be happy with the movies, and the ads, and the clothes in the stores, and the doctors, and the eyes as you walk down the street all telling you there is something wrong with you? No. You cannot be happy. Because, you poor darling baby, you believe them."

“It may be that the impressions of her infancy are caught somehow in the pulp of her eyes, luring her. Or there may be some hooked structure in her cells that twist her toward all that the world calls freakish.”

“'Show off' was no insult in our family, but Arty had a way of turning 'sweetheart' into a thumb in the eye.”

“Papa had looked bad last time. This time he looked like Death's rectum.”

“And they looked at her, watched her, wanted to squirt her full of baby juice.”

“I had maggot brains that night and may have imagined half of it, and misunderstood the rest.”

“The whiskey is amazing to me. I wonder why I never realized that I would like it. I wonder why I never tried it before. Liking it so much is dangerous now, and so I hold it and look through it, and drink it very slowly.”