Kindness. The most unkind thing of all.

All my life I had feared imprisonment, the nun's cell, the hospital bed, the places where one faced the self without distraction, without the crutches of other people.

it is not good to repudiate the dead because then they do not leave you alone, they are like dogs that bark intermittently at night.

I was lonelier than I should be, for a woman in love, or half in love.

what makes us so afraid is the thing we half see, or half hear, as in a wood at dusk, when a tree stump becomes an animal and a sound becomes a siren. And most of that fear is the fear of not knowing, of not actually seeing correctly.

I am not kind, I cut people off as with shears and I drop them like nettles.

I crossed the room, and what you did was to feel my hair over and over again and in different ways, touch it, with the palm of your hand... felt it, strands of hair, with your fingers, touched it as if it were cloth, the way a child touches its favorite surfaces.