first love/late spring

“Well I don’t think/that I ever loved you/more/then when you/turned away

“Nobody’d be different. The only thing that would be different would be you”

“he said softly, aloud, “I’ll stay with you until I am dead.”

“[we] couldn’t have talked about those things—at least, not then. So we gave each other our best-loved possessions, and hoped to get them back. When you think of it, that’s not so silly.”

“Once women have shed the conventions of pure femininity that they have been forced to adopt in their appearance, their true humanity, born of pain and humiliation, will emerge.”

“Not only did men leave and children grow up and die, but even the misery didn’t last. One day she wouldn’t even have that. This very grief that had twisted her into a curve on the floor and flayed her would be gone. She would lose that too.”

“Hell ain’t things lasting forever. Hell is change.”

“You knew me and had listened to the things I said in the night, and heard me in the bathroom and laughed at my raggedy girdle and I laughed too because I knew you too, Jude. So how could you leave me when you knew me?”