The rare, delicate flavor of a life after retiring in one's sixties, whatever one has "retired" from, the pleasure I experienced beyond my job at Columbia, is a gift of life in the last decades. but it is not easily learned. . . . But sometimes, the only way to live is to get out, or at least seriously to contemplate getting out, doing the impossible,flinging the conventional tea.

It's hard to be happy, and safe, and applauded in a miserable world.

One cannot make up stories; one can only retell in new ways the stories one has already heard.

Whether deliberately, unconsciously or accidentally, she seems to have composed her own life so that its fitful, rudderless, and self-doubting first half was alchemized into gold when the austere bluestocking became the fallen woman.

We cannot guess the outcome of our actions... Which is why our actions must always be acceptable in themselves, and not as strategies.

That is the point of quotations. One can use another's words to be insulting.

one sank into the ancient sin of anomie when challenges failed.