Nothing fails like failure

Nothing succeeds, they say, like success. And certainly nothing fails like failure.

On one thing professionals and amateurs agree: mothers can't win.

Some of what we read in classical literature is not relative to our condition, but then many women novelists and poets have turned it upside down and told the stories from the other point of view.

There are some people who cannot get onto a train without imagining that they are about to voyage into the significant unknown; as though the notion of movement were inseparably connected with the notion of discovery, as though each displacement of the body were a displacement of the soul.

I'd rather be at the end of a dying tradition, which I admire, than at the beginning of a tradition which I deplore.

You have to be careful what you imagine, because the act of imagining is the act of encouraging yourself to be a certain kind of person.