I'm concerned about the unknowability of other people..

We are too kind, too willing--too unwilling too--reaching out blindly with a grasping hand but not knowing how to ask for what we don't even know we ….

This is why I read novels: so I can escape my own unrelenting monologue..

Open a book this minute and start reading. Don’t move until you’ve reached page fifty. Until you’ve buried your thoughts in print. Cover yourself wit….

There are chapters in every life which are seldom read and certainly not aloud..

These are frightening times...when she feels herself annointed by loneliness..

Anyone's childhood can be an act of disablement if rehearsed and replayed and squinted at in a certain light. . ..

It's hard work being a person, you have to do it every single day..

The scolding voice is her own, so abrasive and quick, yet so powerless to move her..

Why should men be allowed to strut under the privilege of their life adventures, wearing them like a breast full of medals, while women went all gray….

Eventually, everything gets stuck between a pair of parentheses or buried in the bottom of a trunk..

A childhood is what anyone wants to remember of it. It leaves behind no fossils, except perhaps in fiction..

And yet, within her anxiety, secured there like a gemstone, she carries the cool and curious power of occasionally being able to see the world vividl….

Words are our life. We are human because we use language. So I think we are less human when we use less language..

nothing she did or said was quite what she meant but still her life could be called a monument shaped in a slant of available light and set to the mo….

I don't think I would have been a writer if I hadn't been a mother. I wanted to construct something that contained some of these feelings that I had,….

The silence is perfect, and yet a torment..

A woman's life isn't worth a plateful of cabbage if she hasn't felt life stir under her heart. Taking a little one to nurse, watching him grow to man….

It's the arrangement of events which makes the stories. It's throwing away, compressing, underlining. Hindsight can give structure to anything, but y….

Our friendship is made up of these brief frenzied exchanges, but the quality of our conversation, for all its feverish outpouring, is genuine..

In a long and healthy life, which is what most of us have, there is plenty of time..