How do you think it would feel to be obliged to ask for a seat-belt extender on an airplane? For the unfashionably bulgy, life is a series of small humiliations.

Illness is regarded as a crime, and crime is regarded as illness.

It's the perpetually unfinished quality of housework that makes it oppressive - it never ends, like bad psychoanalysis, or a dream interrupted. It is paradoxically true that it is exactly this daily re-creation of the world that lends housekeeping its nobility and romance.

The dream police will not let me have sexual fantasies.

Every house we have lived in, every building to which our hands have lent their work, belongs to us by virtue of love or of regret.

Sometimes I think that just not thinking of oneself is a form of prayer. . .

Children hold us hostage; they represent our commitment to the future.