You took a walk on a Sunday afternoon and came to a nice neighborhood, very refined. You saw a small one of these trees through the iron gate leading to someone's yard and you knew that soon that section of Brooklyn would get to be a tenement district. The tree knew. It came there first. Afterwards, poor foreigners seeped in and the quiet old brownstone houses were hacked up into flats, feather beds were pushed out on the window sills to air and the Tree of Heaven flourished. That was the kind of tree it was. It liked poor people.

And that's where the whole trouble is. We're too much alike to understand each other because we don't even understand our own selves.

I wrote about people who liked fake fireplaces in their parlor, who thought a brass horse with a clock embedded in its flank was wonderful.

She had become accustomed to being lonely. She was used to walking alone and to being considered 'different.' She did not suffer too much.

Oh time...time, pass so that I forget! Oh time, Great Healer, pass over me and let me forget.

But this tree in the yard-this tree that men chopped down...this tree that they built a bonfire around, trying to burn up it's stump-this tree lived! It lived! And nothing could destroy it.

Books became her friends, and there was one for every mood.