Of course, English is a very powerful language, a colonizer's language and a gift to a writer. English has destroyed and sucked up the languages of other cultures - its cruelty is its vitality.

Women don't realize how much store men set on the regularity of their habits. We absorb their comings and goings into our bodies, their rhythms into our bones.

I stood there in the shadowed doorway thinking with my tears. Yes, tears can be thoughts, why not?

And it occurred to me how even pulling trees that day, just months ago, I was in heaven. Unaware. I had known nothing even as the evil was occurring, I hadn't been touched yet.

And how funny, strange, that a thing can grow so powerful even when planted in the wrong place. Ideas too, I muttered. Ideas.

The square root of I is I.

...one cannot but wonder how an environment can make people despair and sit idle and then, by changing the conditions, one can transform the same people into matchless performers.

To win without risk is to triumph without glory.

Fine friendship requires duration rather than fitful intensity.

I shall lie folded like a saint, Lapped in a scented linen sheet, On a bedstead striped with bright-blue paint, Narrow and cold and neat.

Never does a person see any beauty in Christ as a Savior, until they discover that they are a lost and ruined sinner.

I don't wear lipstick when I'm not at work.

I was married once before, and I stopped.

When knowledge is scant or conflicting, folklore takes over.

Nymphets do not occur in polar regions.