When you get to be my age, all your friends have either died or moved to Florida.

I should coldly, clinically think of myself and stop worrying about other people, as though I'm a necessary woman, indispensable to their happiness and well-being. Self-preservation is the first law. I must start trying to obey the law.

Isn't it boring ... how people always want to tell you their own stories instead of listening to yours? I suppose that's why psychiatrists are better than friends; the paid listener doesn't interrupt with his own experiences.

Emotion seemed more valid than experience, for I had so much of the former and so little of the latter.

Eighty's a landmark and people treat you differently than they do when you're seventy-nine. At seventy-nine, if you drop something it just lies there. At eighty, people pick it up for you.

Vanity, wounded pride, rejection, self-delusion. I could recite a litany of little pinpricks that finally produce a gaping wound. That's how marriages and friendships come apart.

Mail from home was so important when you were traveling. It kept you in touch with the familiar, even the part you were running from.