Self-pity is never useful. It tends to distort like a fun-house mirror.

We also have to make sure our children know the history of women. Tell them the rotten truth: It wasn't always possible for women to become doctors or managers or insurance people. Let them be armed with a true picture of the way we want it to be.

God is a God of Lovingkindness.

Decay is quiet but ghastly, explosion is dramatic and dreadful. There's not much to choose between the two of them in reality, and most of our lives have sufficient of both.

I have always been fascinated by the human mind, conscious and unconscious - that is what writing and reading is about, too. The why of your life and the why of your choices and the what has happened that you know and the what that you don't know is really riveting, and psychoanalysts share my wonder at how it all unfolds.

We flashed our feathers when the feathers were fit to be flashed, and now, in drearier days, many stay indoors.

It's true, we tend to write about the same thing over and over again because this is our trauma. If I had been in World War II, I might have been writing about D-Day over and over again.