We are all so much more complicated than we allow ourselves to appear.

Time is a cruel thief to rob us of our former selves. We lose as much to life as we do to death.

Whenever life gets to be too much for me, I have a hard time keeping my eyes open. Sleeping is cheaper and safer than drinking. It keeps you from saying or doing things you'll regret later, and though you may have nightmares, you won't wake up with a hangover. I recommend it wholeheartedly.

Though my own life is filled with activity, letters encourage momentary escape into other lives, and I come back to my own with greater contentment.

Sometimes being a good mother gets in the way of being a good person.

We are all so much more complicated than we allow ourselves to appear.

Sometimes I think it is ... frustration with life as it is lived day to day that compels me to write such long letters to people who seldom reply in kind, if indeed they reply at all. Somehow by compressing and editing the events of my life, I infuse them with a dramatic intensity totally lacking at the time, but oddly enough I find that years later what I remember is not the event as I lived it but as I described it in a letter.