“Everyone had their own agenda. She just had to stop reacting emotionally: decipher the real motives for their behaviour without taking every word as a personal attack.”

“Everyone is born a poet - a person discovering the way words sound and work, caring and delighting in words. I just kept on doing what everyone starts out doing. The real question is: Why did other people stop?”

“I had been running as fast as I could for all of my adult life. A person can’t listen effectively while running. A running mother is not able to pick up clues. She is not able to let go of her own agenda long enough to stop and listen.”

“She felt as if she had been running, and had created a hill and was racing down the other side, and there was no stopping now. Gravity was taking her where she had to go. "But -- everyone cares about something. Don't they?”

“In a story you had to find a reason, but real life gets on very well without even Freudian motivations.”

“Real people had real agendas, real demands, real expectations about how other people should behave.”