What's the best thing you can do for your writing? Construct a boring life.

I have wanted everything as a writer and a woman, but most of all a world changed utterly by my revelations.

Twenty years after we had left so fierce and proud, we were all right back where we had started, yoked to each other and the same old drama.

People begin to write in order to create what they have not found and, a little bit, to give something back.

I fell into shame like a suicide throws herself into a river. (253)

Delia picked at the raw sores of her conscience...Drunk or sober, Delia lived in the small town in her heart, ignoring the world in which all her love had turned to grief.

There is a place where we are always alone with our own mortality, where we must simply have something greater than ourselves to hold onto-God or history or politics or literature or a belief in the healing power of love, or even righteous anger.... A reason to believe, a way to take the world by the throat and insist that there is more to this life than we have ever imagined.