The body is a damn hard thing to kill.

As a writer one has to take the chance on being a fool.

Perhaps I am no one. True, I have a body and I cannot escape from it. I would like to fly out of my head, but that is out of the question.

Emerald as heavy as a golf course, ruby as dark as an afterbirth, diamond as white as sun on the sea.

... a starving man doesn't ask what the meal is.

Now I am just an elderly lady who is full of spleen, who humps around greater Boston in a God-awful hat, who never lived and yet outlived her time, hating men and dogs and Democrats.

God owns heaven but He craves the earth.