'Ms.' is a syllable which sounds like a bumble bee is breaking wind.

A happy childhood can't be cured. Mine'll hang around my neck like a rainbow, that's all, instead of a noose.

The words! I collected them in all shapes and sizes and hung them like bangles in my mind.

How clerks love refusing. It salves them for being clerks.

But memory, after a time, dispenses its own emphasis, making a feuilleton of what we once thought most ponderable, laying its wreath on what we never thought to recall.

Balance is compromise. Of the muscles.

What I have written-and how I came to write it-is most powerfully what I am.