You begin always knowing nothing. You remain forever an amateur, a first timer.

Dieting fooled you into thinking you could control your life.

She held herself very straight, like Audrey Hepburn, whom all women idolize and men never think about.

The trees like lungs filling with air. My sister, the mean one, pulling my hair.

We knew the pain of winter rushing up your skirt, and the ache of keeping your knees together in class, and how drab and infuriating it was to jump rope while the boys played baseball. We could never understand why the girls cared so much about being mature, or why they felt compelled to compliment each other.

I was unemployable when I got out of college.

What lingered after them was not life, which always overcomes natural death, but the most trivial list of mundane facts: a clock ticking on a wall, a room dim at noon, and the outrageousness of a human being thinking only of herself.