Perhaps if I make myself write I shall find out what is wrong with me.

Perhaps watching someone you love suffer can teach you even more than suffering yourself can.

There is something revolting about the way girls' minds so often jump to marriage long before they jump to love.

Was I the only woman in the world who, at my age - and after a lifetime of quite rampant independence - still did not quite feel grown up?

But some characters in books are really real--Jane Austen's are; and I know those five Bennets at the opening of Pride and Prejudice, simply waiting to raven the young men at Netherfield Park, are not giving one thought to the real facts of marriage.

I could hear rain still pouring from the gutters and a thin branch scraping against one of the windows; but the church seemed completely cut off from the restless day outside--just as I felt cut off from the church. I thought: I am a restlessness inside a stillness inside a restlessness.

Sometimes [the expression] old age has a kind of harrowing beauty. But elderly - ugh!