I liked the fact she understood how we all have little secret habits that seem normal enough to us, but which we know better than to mention out loud.

Was this the big one or was this the small tremor, the warning? Does it get better - does the sensation of being in a dream underwater go away?

People should pay more attention. Everyone wants attention, but no one wants to give attention.

I'm feeling how profoundly my family disappointed me and in the end how I retreated, how I became nothing, because that was much less risky than attempting to be something, to be anything in the face of such contempt.

Every family has a story that it tells itself, that it passes on to the children and grandchildren. The story grows over the years, mutates, some parts are sharpened, others dropped, and there is often debate about what really happened. But even with these different sides of the same story, there is still agreement that this is the family story. And in the absence of other narratives, it becomes the flagpole that the family hangs its identity from.

Sometimes you can do things for others that you can't do for yourself.

A lot of people get flipped out if you're quiet. They say stuff like, What are you thinking? And if they don't start interrogating you, they start talking, going on and on about stuff that's totally irrelevant, and the silence gets so big and loud that it's scary.