My mother used to go out on her own, and I used to have to keep a look out for my stepfather coming home.

Discretion is the polite word for hypocrisy.

As a little girl I used to daydream about my real father coming on a white horse to rescue me.

The fathers, if they got me alone, would try to kiss and fondle me. I hated it.

Bill Astor knew these papers were missing. Stephen showed his hand in October.

I like to think that people live on in other people's memories.

I never found anyone who was good enough, who I could trust enough.

Even a criminal has the right to a new life, but they made sure I did not have that. They just didn't stop calling me a prostitute for ever and ever and ever and ever.

We knew we were talking about spies. I knew he knew I knew. I was digging my own grave.

One way of reading my life is that I have been in constant search for a father.

I'm terrified of men these days. If someone asked me out now, I don't know what I'd say, how I'd react. But I couldn't go through with it, not at all. I suppose I've been terrified of them all along.

Things change after you die, though, I guess because dying is the loneliest thing you can do.

There is no reason for beauty. It just is.

There are people who have benefited from therapy without being confronted with the past at all.

There is no beginning that is a blank page.

Place hitting is, in a sense, glorified bunting. I only take a half swing at the ball, and the weight of the bat rather than my swing is what drives it.

There is a sort of love whose very excessiveness prevents the lover's being jealous.

You read so much about the healing power of memoir, but you don't read about the wounding power it has first. The recollection of past events is not, in and of itself, therapeutic.

We read the world - television, movies, songs, books - and the people in it through the lens of our own lives.

As with all my new pets, I gently bit each kitten on the face. This is how I let my animals know that I am now their mother.

It also has potential to cause problems to individuals who had nothing to do with the terrorism issue.