La campana de cristal

I felt dreadfully inadequate. The trouble was, I had been inadequate all along, I simply hadn't thought about it.

The trouble was, I hated the idea of serving men in any way. I wanted to dictate my own thrilling letters.

I thought how strange it had never occured to me before that I was only purely happy until I was nine years old.

Later Buddy told me the woman was on a drug that would make her forget she'd had any pain and that when she swore and groaned she really didn't know what she was doing because she was in a kind of twilight sleep.
I thought it sounded just like the sort of drug a man would invent. Here was a woman in terrible pain, obviously feeling every bit of it or she wouldn't groan like that, and she would go straight home and start another baby, because the drug would make her forget how bad the pain had been, when all the time, in some secret part of her, that long, blind, doorless and windowless corridor of pain was waiting to open up and shut her in again.

If you expect nothing from somebody you are never disappointed

There is nothing like puking with somebody to make you into old friends.

I certainly learned a lot of things I never would have learned otherwise this way, and even when they surprised me or made me sick I never let on, but pretended that's the way I knew things were all the time.

I began to think vodka was my drink at last. It didn't taste like anything but it went straight down into my stomach like a sword swallower's sword and made me feel powerful and godlike.

I felt very still and very empty, the way the eye of a tornado must feel, moving dully along in the middle of the surrounding hullabaloo.

Donde quiera que estuviera sentada - en la cubierta de unbarco o en la terraza de un café en París o en Bangkok - estaría sentada bajo la misma campana de cristal, agitándome en mi propio aire viciado.