Everything people do that doesn’t work has to be somebody else’s fault. Next time you know, geezers’ll be suing the government for getting old and kids’ll be taking their mommies to court because they came out ugly.

Besides, I'd heard too many Karen Carpenter tales at Gladstone PTA meetings, and they often took the form of boasts. The prestigious diagnosis of anorexia seemed much coveted not only by the students but by their mothers, who would compete over whose daughter ate less. No wonder the poor girls were a mess.

When you've been afraid of something for long enough and it comes to pass, the terrible thing is a release. For in the belly of the badness there is no more fear.

Built like an oak tree, against which I could pitch my pillow and read; mornings, I could curl into the crook of your branches.

You were always uncomfortable with the rhetoric of emotion, which is quite a different matter from discomfort with emotion itself.

Only a country that feels invulnerable can afford political turmoil as entertainment.

The only way my head was going truly somewhere else was to travel to a different life and not a different airport.