The way you define yourself as a writer is that you write every time you have a free minute. If you didn't behave that way you would never do anything.

So we dream on. Thus we invent our lives. We give ourselves a sainted mother, we make our father a hero; and someone’s older brother and someone’s older sister – they become our heroes too. We invent what we love and what we fear. There is always a brave lost brother – and a little lost sister, too. We dream on and on: the best hotel, the perfect family, the resort life. And our dreams escape us almost as vividly as we can imagine them.

What is hardest to accept about the passage of time is that the people who once mattered the most to us wind up in parentheses.

Whereas she wished more of the population were better educated, she also believed that education was largely wasted on the majority of the people she met.

They were involved in that awkward procedure of getting to unknow each other.

I was brought up in a community, in a family that valued such things as good manners, and I still do.

I think now that is the nature of hymns-they make us want to repeat them...they are a part of any service, and often the only part of a funeral service, that makes us feel everything is acceptable.