Life proceeds, it enrages. The untouched ones spend their luck without a thought, believing they deserve it.

Literature sucks you into another psyche. So the creation of empathy necessarily influences how you'll behave to other people.

Watching Italians eat (especially men, I have to say) is a form of tourism the books don't tell you about. They close their eyes, raise their eyebrows into accent marks, and make sounds of acute appreciation. It's fairly sexy. Of course I don't know how these men behave at home, if they help with the cooking or are vain and boorish and mistreat their wives. I realized Mediterranean cultures have their issues. Fine, don't burst my bubble. I didn’t want to marry these guys, I just wanted to watch. (p. 247)

The bad thing about small-town life is that everybody knows your business...I suppose that is my central obsession. What we owe to society, what we owe to ourselves.

Fiction and essays can create empathy for the theoretical stranger.

A woman without a man -- a condition of 'manlessness' -- is defined as alone. But a single mother is less alone than the average housewife.

In the places that call me out, I know I'll recover my wordless childhood trust in the largeness of life and its willingness to take me in.