When the past is recaptured by the imagination, breath is put back into life.

There are many women who write as they think they should write - to imitate men and make a place for themselves in literature.

You alone became the outer surface of my life, the side I never see, and you will be that, the unknown part of me, until I die.

I know it's not clothes that make women beautiful or otherwise, nor beauty care, nor expensive creams, nor the distinction of costliness of their finery. I know the problem lies elsewhere. I don't know where. I only know it isn't where women think.

Finding yourself in a hole, at the bottom of a hole, in almost total solitude, and discovering that only writing can save you. To be without the slightest subject for a book, the slightest idea for a book, is to find yourself, once again, before a book. A vast emptiness. A possible book. Before nothing. Before something like living, naked writing, like something terrible, terrible to overcome.

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

I am dead. I have no desire for you. My body no longer wants the one who doesn’t love.