I can't think of one great human being in the arts, or in history generally, who conformed, who succeeded, as education experts tell us children must succeed, with his peer group.

It's not my brain that's writing the book, it's these hands of mine.

It's a very American trait, this wanting people to think well of us. It's a young want, and I am ashamed of it in myself. I am not always a good daughter, even though my lacks are in areas different from her complaints. Haven't I learned yet that the desire to be perfect is always disastrous and, at the least, loses me in the mire of false guilt?

I believe that consistently we need to look for good, and not for evil, that when we look for evil we call up evil, while heaven comes closer when we acknowledge it.

It was the same way with silence. This was more than silence. A deaf person can feel vibrations. Here there was nothing to feel.

Love. That was what she had that IT did not have.

I rebel against death, yet I know that it is how I respond to death's inevitability that is going to make me less or more fully alive.