She hopes for nothing except fine weather and a resolution. She wants to end properly, like a good sentence.

I cannot believe homosexuality is that much fun. Heterosexuality certainly is not.

And so it happened again, the daily miracle whereby interiority opens out and brings to bloom the million-petalled flower of being here, in the world, with other people. Neither as hard as she had thought it might be nor as easy as it appeared.

I find it impossible to experience either pride or shame over accidents of genetics in which I had no active part. I'm not necessarily proud to be female. I am not even proud to be human — I only love to be so.

I'm just interested in women's friendships generally. It always seems to me, and this is just my pet theory, that women are kind of at the sharp end of capitalism one way or another. Mainly because they buy everything. In a practical sense, women buy most things. They're always comparing - to friends, to famous people, to other people. An obsessive act of comparison.

You are never stronger...than when you land on the other side of despair.

This is what a woman is: unadorned, after children and work and age, and experience-these are the marks of living.