He considers me also a little fragile because artistic. I need to be cared for, like a potted plant.

Kafka thought his stories were hilarious. We don't necessarily have that reaction to them, but he certainly laughed his head off every time he read them out loud.

What a lost person needs is a map of the territory, with his own position marked on it so he can see where he is in relation to everything else. Literature is not only a mirror; it is also a map, a geography of the mind. Our literature is one such map, if we can learn to read it as our literature, as the product of who and where we have been. We need such a map desperately, we need to know about here, because here is where we live. For the members of a country or a culture, shared knowledge of their place, their here, is not a luxury but a necessity. Without that knowledge we will not survive.

Time has not stood still. It has washed over me, washed me away, as if I'm nothing more than a woman of sand, left by a careless child too near the water.

I don't find the idea of sewing degrading. A thing is degrading when you are forced to do it, through economic reasons or through slavery or some other form of compulsion.

A word after a word after a word is power.

Perhaps I write for no one. Perhaps for the same person children are writing for when they scrawl their names in the snow.