It was amazing how it worked: the tiniest bit of truth made credible the greatest lies.

When I'm creating a character, it's a little bit like what my theater teachers used to tell me about Stanislavsky, like if you're using sense memory to do a scene - if you have to cry in a scene, you try to remember something in your life that made you cry and you use that in order to get the tears.

They were bound for college, husbands, child-rearing, unhappiness only dimly perceived- bound, in other words, for life.

Basically what we have here is a dreamer. Somebody out of touch with reality. When she jumped, she probably thought she'd fly

The girls took into their own hands decisions better left to God. They became too powerful to live among us, too self-concerned, too visionary, too blind.

Now all the mute objects of my life seem to tell my story, to stretch back in time, if I look closely enough.

Household objects lost meaning. A bedside clock became a hunk of molded plastic, telling something called time, in a world marking it's passage for some reason.