[Children] would have messed up my apartment. In the main, they are ungrateful. They would have siphoned too much time away from the writing of my precious books.

[Children] would have messed up my apartment. In the main, they are ungrateful. They would have siphoned too much time away from the writing of my precious books.

I am in flight from my story every day, and it dogs me like a faithful stray.

A lot of people get so hung up on what they can't have that they don't think for a second about whether they really want it.

Yet Irina had once tucked away, she wasn't sure when or why, that happiness is almost definitionally a condition of which you are not aware at the time. To inhabit your own contentment is to be wholly present, with no orbiting satellite to take clinical readings of the state of the planet. Conventionally, you grow conscious of happiness at the very point that it begins to elude you. When not misused to talk yourself into something - when not a lie - the h-word is a classification applied in retrospect. It is a bracketing assessment, a label only decisively pasted onto an era once it is over.

I thought at the time that I couldn't be horrified anymore, or wounded. I suppose that's a common conceit, that you've already been so damaged that damage itself, in its totality, makes you safe.

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.