Valerie Martin

“I see I have this patience to wait it out, and the truth is no matter how dark I feel I would never take my own life, because when the darkness is over, then what a blessing is the feeblest ray of light!”

“Everyone else felt the need to assure me that Mother's death was part of God's plan. Exactly, I wanted to shout after reading this sentiment half a dozen times--- his plan is to kill us all, and if an innocent child dies in agony and a wicked man breathes his last at an advanced age in his sleep, who are we to call it injustice?”

“The natural beauty of the earth made hard for me to consider the pathetic struggle of humans on the face of it. The great release of death, I thought, was not from the bondage to our lovely planet- who could ever wish to leave this extraordinary place?- but from one another.”

“The air was still. It was that hour before evening when the sun sheds great horizontal beams just above the horizon and the air itself reveals levels of dust and insect life previously unthought of.”

“I've caused you pain, and I'm sorry for it,' she said. 'But perhaps that pain will keep you from forgetting me.”

“...because it requires the total surrender of my will and finally, ultimately, the wholesale destruction of my ego. That is hard. It I'm going to another world, I cry out, I want to be ME in it.”

“...most people never experience such a passion, that I had been incredibly, divinely fortunate to have found, in a world where most souls dig there own graves with the sharp edge of their bitter loneliness...”

“To fear an inner life, she thought, was the greatest foolishness. It was like fearing a breath of air. Why did people find it harder to admit to a universe within than without? Why trust, for a moment, one's own absurd measurement of either?”

“That's my problem. I'm constantly wary. I can't trust anyone.”

“What was the good at having an ideal if everyone is trying to beat everyone else at admitting how impossible it is to achieve it.”

“We long for a life we never had but of which we seem to have a clear memory; a life in wich there is no longing.”

“And it seemed to me that longing was everything, longing is all we are.”

“Self-inflicted pain has a calming effect; it clears the head, diminishes one's fascination with the ego, and most important, gives one the sense of having taken some real action against the everyday foolishness of the body and of the vagrant, willful, heedless imagination.”

“He put a dark place in me and I can't forgive him for that. But it's a part of me now and how can I regret what I am - though it often makes me sad.”

“(A) trip to the attic is an excursion into history, and...all over the world the present unravels beneath the stored detritus of the past; that's what attics are for.”

“One feels relieved these days when a play is not like television.”

“Actors are superstitious about beggars, perhaps because we're largely in the same line.”

“(M)uch as we might imagine we can leave the past behind, it has a nasty way of pressing its hoary old face against the window just as we were sitting down to the feast.”

“Sex can be estranging; it can drive two otherwise compatible people apart.”