i want to hear what's happened to you," she said evenly after a while. she gestured in the direction, down river, of the butcher shop. "it's just that there is nowhere else to start," she said gently. "niether of us is the same. but i'm different because of small, good, manageable things. you're different because ... things i don't know.

Here I am, where I ought to be. A writer must have a place where he or she feels this, the place to love and be irritated with.

Love won't be tampered with, love won't go away. Push it to one side and it creeps to the other.

I prefer to have some beliefs that don't make logical sense.

When women age into their power, no wind can upset them, no hand turn aside their knowledge, no fact can deflect their point of view.

She had always been a reader… but now she was obsessed. Since her discovery of the book hoard downstairs from her job, she’d been caught up in one such collection of people and their doings after the next…The pleasure of this sort of life – bookish, she supposed it might be called, a reading life – had made her isolation into a rich and even subversive thing. She inhabited one consoling or horrifying persona after another…That she was childless and husbandless and poor meant less once she picked up a book. Her mistakes disappeared into it. She lived with an invented force.

Society is like this card game here, cousin. We got dealt our hand before we were even born, and as we grow we have to play as best as we can.