A hand up is worthier than one's own fist grasping a higher rung of the ladder.

These short stories establish Sontag's originality . . . her unique vision, her success with experiments in the form . . . Sontag makes a wonderful stew of the past, the life caught in memory and imagination, serves it all up lavishly laced with silences, and provides us with a gourmand's series of short courses.

The reason that extended solitude seemed so hard to endure was not that we missed others but that we began to wonder if we ourselves were present, because for so long our existence depended upon assurances from them.

one keeps one's friends better when one is alone. The corollary to this is that one loses one's friends, slowly, when one sees them too often or when they visit for too long a time.

Old age is somewhat like dieting. Every day there is less of us to be observed.

Having a book is somewhat like having a baby, as many woman writers have observed before me: the conception, the long preparation, the wait, the growing heaviness (not of body in this case but of the spirit and the manuscript) toward the end, the initial delight at the sight of the product, fully formed and seemingly perfect, and then the usual postpartum depression. What will people whose opinion I care about, and those whose views I don't value but have weight in the world of reader, think of it?

My eyes glaze over at a writer solving tiny problems.