Banality is sometimes striking.

She had lived her early years as though she were waiting for something she might, but never did, become.

For that's what a woman, a mother wants - to teach her children to take an interest in life. She knows it's safer for them to be interested in other people's happiness than to believe in their own.

He wanted to pay her; he thought women ought to be paid for keeping men from dying or going out of their minds.

I often think of the image only I can see now, and of which I’ve never spoken. It’s always there, in the same silence, amazing. It’s the only image of myself I like, the only one in which I recognize myself, in which I delight

The words emerge from her body without her realizing it, as if she were being visited by the memory of a language long forsaken.

Life is only lived full-time by women with children.