What other grown-up gets told how to do their job so often as a writer?

A sentence is born into this world neither good nor bad, and that to establish its character is a question of the subtlest possible adjustments, a process of intuition to which exaggeration and force are fatal.

I absolutely don't dislike children - I would choose their company over adult company any time.

A neighbor is something that belongs to the stable world of home life, the thing that lives next door to you.

I felt that I could swim for miles, out into the ocean: a desire for freedom, an impulse to move, tugged at me as though it were a thread fastened to my chest. It was an impulse I knew well, and I had learned that it was not the summons from a larger world I used to believe it to be. It was simply a desire to escape from what I had.

I am a good and interested mother - which has surprised me.

How can there be so many mothers in the world but so little sense of what it might be to become one?