giving the utmost of herself to three absorbing interests [marriage, motherhood, career] ... was a problem for a superwoman, and a job for a superwoman, and only some such fabled being could have accomplished it with success.

What I do not know and cannot even hope to understand before I die is why human beings are willfully, coldly, matter-of-factly cruel to each other ... What nerve has atrophied in the torturer, or worse is sensually moved?

Failures to love are irremediable and irredeemable.

Language is one of the thin walls humanity has built up over centuries against its own bestial and destructive impulses.

For what I have received may the Lord make me truly thankful. And more truly for what I have not received.

... I used words without precautions. I wanted to disappear into them, I fled into the bovaryism of the writer trying to create an effect.

Speaking the truth, once you have started it, is too exhilarating to draw back.