The bottomless bitter misery of childhood: how little even now it is understood. Probably no adult misery can be compared with a child's despair.

One doesn't have to get anywhere in a marriage. It's not a public conveyance.

So we live; a spirit that broods and hovers over the continual death of time, the lost meaning, the unrecaptured moment, the unremembered face, until the final chop that ends all our moments and plunges that spirit back into the void from which it came.

Freedom may be a value in politics, but it is not a value in morals.

There is no substitute for the comfort supplied by the utterly taken-for-granted relationship.

We are all the judges and the judged, victims of the casual malice and fantasy of others, and ready sources of fantasy and malice in our turn. And if we are sometimes accused of sins of which we are innocent, are there not also other sins of which we are guilty and of which the world knows nothing?

I see myself as Rhoda, not Mary Tyler Moore.