We are too kind, too willing--too unwilling too--reaching out blindly with a grasping hand but not knowing how to ask for what we don't even know we want.

Why should men be allowed to strut under the privilege of their life adventures, wearing them like a breast full of medals, while women went all gray and silent beneath the weight of theirs?

Happiness is the lucky pane of glass you carry in your head. It takes all your cunning just to hang on to it, and once it's smashed you have to move into a different sort of life.

The larger loneliness of our lives evolves from our unwillingness to spend ourselves, stir ourselves. We are always damping down our inner weather, permitting ourselves the comforts of postponement, of rehearsals

The scolding voice is her own, so abrasive and quick, yet so powerless to move her.

Anyone's childhood can be an act of disablement if rehearsed and replayed and squinted at in a certain light. . .

And yet, within her anxiety, secured there like a gemstone, she carries the cool and curious power of occasionally being able to see the world vividly. Clarity bursts upon her a spray of little stars. She understands this, and thinks of it as one of the tricks of consciousness; there is something almost luxurious about it.. The narrative maze opens and permits her to pass through. She may be crowded out of her own life - she knows this for a fact and has always know it - but she possesses, as a compensatory gift, the startling ability to draft alternative versions.