The middle years, caught between children and parents, free of neither: the past stretches back too densely, it is too thickly populated, the future has not yet thinned out.

When nothing is sure, everything is possible.

How unjust life is, to make physical charm so immediately apparent or absent, when one can get away with vices untold for ever.

Family life itself, that safest, most traditional, most approved of female choices, is not a sanctuary: It is, perpetually, a dangerous place.

Scenery can be a violent stimulant.

Lord knows what incommunicable small terrors infants go through, unknown to all.

Novels, since the birth of the genre, have been full of rejected, seduced, and abandoned maidens, whose proper fate is to die.

The human mind can bear plenty of reality but not too much intermittent gloom.

The women are always vixens or monsters. They can't just be normal people in the book.

Nothing fails like failure

Why can't people be both flexible and efficient?

I am inhabited by a cry. Nightly it flaps outLooking, with its hooks, for something to love.

Two forces create eternity – a fairy tale and a dream from the fairy tale.

Chase used to say, 'When you're looking at your canvas and worrying about it, try to think of your canvas as the reality and the model as the painted thing.'

We can't hear the balance yet because the soloist is still on the airplane.

In the mere concept of one thing it cannot be found any character of its existence.

Do we really need more romance attached to the act of blowing people away?

There'll be icicles and birthday clothes And sometimes there'll be sorrow

I would love to do an unauthorized biography about Congress. It's like a secret society up there.

There will come a time when the proper education of children, by a glorified system of spontaneous education of choice, similar to the Montessori System, will be made possible.

As a woman, you need to take control of your health. There's no harm in going in and getting checked out. Eventually, you have to ask yourself: 'Do I want to live at 100% or 80%?'