This was not as real as my despairing sense that nothing was real for me, nothing would ever be real for me again – unless, indeed, this sensation of falling was reality…

There are so many ways of being despicable it quite makes one’s head spin. But the way to be really despicable is to be contemptuous of other people’s pain.

Perhaps home is not a place but simply an irrevocable condition.

You don’t have a home until you leave it and then, when you have left it, you never can go back.

People are too various to be treated so lightly. I am too various to be trusted.

Confusion is a luxury which only the very, very young can possibly afford and you are not that young anymore

If you cannot love me, I will die. Before you came I wanted to die, I have told you many times. It is cruel to have made me want to live only to make my death more bloody.

There are women who have forgotten that to be a woman doesn't simply mean humiliation, doesn't simply mean bitterness. I haven't forgotten it yet...I'm not going to forget it.

The world is mostly divided between madmen who remember and madmen who forget. Heroes are rare.

The real troubles with living is that living is so banal.

She fitted in my arms, she always had, and the shock of holding her caused me to feel that my arms had been empty since she had been away.

Enlightenment must come little by little - otherwise it would overwhelm.

Hairspray and blusher, eyelash curlers, eye-shadow palettes the size of tea-trays. Even before they left school it was as if they were already rehearsing for some witless kind of womanhood.

The greatest weapon against stress is our ability to choose one thought over another.

I think we have to safeguard ourselves against people who are a menace to others, quite apart from what may have motivated their deeds.

It is my belief that we all have the need to feel special. It is this need that can bring out the best in us, yet the worst in us.

You wind up listening to one song that you really like 30 times on YouTube and then you're done with it. That's the way it is.

I had never ironed anything in my life. The proper pressing of a shirt was a mystery of the universe akin to black holes and dark matter.

In good writing, words become one with things.

I wonder if the reason I tend to say yes to everything is because I deeply believe that I can survive anything.

I've got to relearn what I was supposed to have learned.