No matter what you wear, not everyone is going to understand what you're saying.

I used to have a really sharp memory. And its loss has proven destabilizing from an identity perspective.

Like Semmering Academy, the Grove School was a Gothic pile of bricks run by 1950s-era chalk drones, which maintained its cultural viability by perpetuating a weirdly seductive anxiety throughout its community. Mary herself was a victim of the seduction; despite the trying and repetitive emotional requirements of her job, she remained eternally fascinated by the wicker-thin girls and their wicker-thin mothers, all of them favoring dark wool skirts and macintoshes and unreadably far-away expressions; if she squinted, they could have emerged intact from any of the last seven decades.

We want to believe we couldn't be replaced, and that the people we love are irreplaceable.

Home is the place where, when you go there, they have to take you in. In other words: Home has exceedingly low standards.

I think there’s a lot of threshold weeping. Like, am I doing this? Am I really wearing this out in the world? My daughter is very much like that. She will put clothes on and her clothes just make her beside herself. They make her so sad sometimes. And you do realize you feel betrayed sometimes by your own clothing. You put something on that usually protects you and makes you OK, and sometimes you’re just not fit for the world and even your best pants can’t overcome that feeling for you.

If, at some future point, my face collapses around my eyes, I'd probably do something about it. My eyes are where I live, and if people couldn't see them, no one would know me.