She was learning, quite late, what many people around her appeared to have known since childhood that life can be perfectly satisfying without major achievements.

Every year, when you're a child, you become a different person.

What she wants to do if she can get the time to do it, is not so much to live in the past as to open it up and get one good look at it".

There would never be any room in her for anything else. No room for anything but the realization of what she had done.

He never wanted to be away from her. She had the spark of life.

Naturally my stories are about women - I'm a woman. I don't know what the term is for men who write mostly about men. I'm not always sure what is meant by "feminist." In the beginning I used to say, well, of course I'm a feminist. But if it means that I follow a kind of feminist theory, or know anything about it, then I'm not. I think I'm a feminist as far as thinking that the experience of women is important. That is really the basis of feminism.

I sit watching the brown oceanic waves of dry country rising into the foothills and I weep monotonously, seasickly. Life is not like the dim ironic stories I like to read, it is like a daytime serial on television. The banality will make you weep as much as anything else.