Maggie Cassidy

"I saw her, standing in the crowd, forlorn, dissatisfied, dark, unpleasantly strange."

"It's only later you learn to lean your head in the lap of God, and rest in love."

"Heirs leap screeching from doctors' laps while the old and the poor die on, and who's to bend over their bed and comfort."

"All in life, prime, young joy days, riches of sixteen, I sneaked off to the lazy unresponsive girl three miles across town by the tragic-flowing dark sad Concord."

"I grieved inside that I had to give her up for Maggie. But I couldn't have Mary and Magdalene both so I had to decide my mind."

"To my utter amazement I saw out of the corner of my eye the colored boy laid out almost flat on the floor in a low slung fantastic starting position, something impossibly modern and submarining and subterranean like bop, like the new gesture of a generation."

"Fluting spring was racing through the corridors and ritual alleys of my sacred brain in holy life and making me wake and resurge to the business of being and becoming a man."

"I'm sure gonna get you tonight — aint gonna be like it used to be with you — I'm gonna find out about you at last."

"She laughed in his face, he slammed the door shut, put out lights, drove her home, drove the car back skittering crazily in the slush, sick, cursing."