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.

How hollow to have no secrets left; you shake yourself and nothing rattles. You're boneless as an anemone.

Here was a thing that would grow old; here was a thing that would turn beautiful and lose that beauty, that would inherit the grace but also the bad ear and flawed figure of her mother, that would smile too much and squint too often and spend the last decades of her life creaming away the wrinkles made in youth until she finally gave up and wore a collar of pears to hide a wattle; here was the ordinary sadness of the world.

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

When you were a little girl, Madam.....was this the woman you dreamed of becoming?

It is a brave and stupid thing, a beautiful thing, to waste one's life for love.

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