So tell me gentleman, tell me the time and place where it was easy to be a woman.

How remarkable we are in our ability to hide things from ourselves - our conscious minds only a small portion of our actual minds, jellyfish floating on a vast dark sea of knowing and deciding.

The possibilities. Is there any greater pain to know what could be, and yet be powerless to make it be?

Surely words are just the background music when passion pounces on a soul.

For me, the historical and genealogical library is the one I use. I'm working on, I'll say, it's a time travel novel. I haven't written very much of it. That's the dirty secret of the Cullman center: The writers don't write their fiction there, they just do their research.

It takes too much imagination to see the sorrows of people we take for happy. Their real battles take place, like those of the stars, in some realm of light imperceptible to the human eye. It is a feat of the mind to guess another's heart.

When I meet a woman whose energy falters at the first barrier,she seems to fade beside my mother.