biographies are a little like marriages: You only have room in your life for one or two.

More people should visit Antarctica, metaphorically speaking, on their own. That is one of the conclusions I have reached, one of my recommendations: explore something, even if it's just a bookshelf. Make a stab in the dark. Read off the beaten path. Your attention is precious. Be careful of other people trying to direct how you dispense it. Confront your own values. Decide what it is you are looking for an then look for it. Perform connoisseurship. We all need to create our own vocabulary of appreciation, or we are trapped by the vocabulary of others.

The literature of women's lives is a tradition of escapees, women who have lived to tell the tale.

biographies are a little like marriages: You only have room in your life for one or two.

When you realize how hard it is to know the truth about yourself, you understand that even the most exhaustive and well-meaning autobiography, determined to tell the truth, represents, at best, a guess. There have been times in my life when I felt incredibly happy. Life was full. I seemed productive. Then I thought,"Am I really happy or am I merely masking a deep depression with frantic activity?" If I don't know such basic things about myself, who does?

There is no neutrality. There is only greater or lesser awareness of one's bias.

an autobiography held out the promise of hearing truths that only friends confess to one another but are knowledge you need to live.