I was thinking of my patients, and how the worst moment for them was when they discovered they were masters of their own fate. It was not a matter of bad or good luck. When they could no longer blame fate, they were in despair.

She had lost herself somewhere along the frontier between her inventions, her stories, her fantasies and her true self. The boundaries had become effaced, the tracks lost, she had walked into pure chaos, and not a chaos which carried her like the galloping of romantic riders in operas and legends, but which suddenly revealed the stage props: a papier-mâché horse.

We are all engaged in the task of peeling off the false selves, the programmed selves, the selves created by our families, our culture, our religions. It is an enormous task because the history of women has been as incompletely told as the history of blacks.

We do not escape into philosophy, psychology, and art--we go there to restore our shattered selves into whole ones.

I postpone death by living, by suffering, by error, by risking, by giving, by losing.

There is no denying that we are suffering from a collective neurosis and the novel which does not face this is not a novel of our time.

Life shrinks or expands in proportion to one's courage.