It is very easy to forgive others their mistakes; it takes more grit and gumption to forgive them for having witnessed your own.

Fiction reveals truths that reality obscures.

Writing is so difficult that I feel that writers, having had their hell on earth, will escape all punishment hereafter.

Each death and departure comes to us as a surprise, a sorrow never anticipated. Life is a long series of farewells; only the circumstances should surprise us.

Justice is a terrible but necessary thing.

If you want a baby, have a new one. Don't baby the old one.

In my time and neighborhood (and in my soul) there was only one standard by which a woman measured success: did some man want her?