Decades go faster toward the end of a century.

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.

Sociology, the guilty science, functions best by alarm.

In a family, the same spoken lines come in over and over. Intimacy exhausts.

I always say that one's poetry is a solace to oneself and a nuisance to one's friends.

Women can't travel light. We're in charge of the basic facts.

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