Success is often harder to take than failure.

I guess experience is just learning at first hand the things you knew all along anyway.

... maybe that's all anyone who writes or paints or sculpts is doing anyway -- excusing themselves for refusing to live like other people or be like them.

Marygreen did not change in sixteen years. It had changed little enough in the past two years.

The only genius that's worth anything is the genius for hard work.

the end of anything is a relief. In every relationship, even the most valuable, there are certain unpleasant tensions - and the ending of it snaps those taut inner wires.

It seemed that up until this moment she had been only half alive.