“Maybe it was I who needed to learn how to be quiet instead of cluttering the moment with too many words.”

“I sat silent, ambushed by love for my sons. And by regret. Regret for the past, when I didn't or couldn't give them the nurturing they needed, and regret for what they-and I-could never have back. The irony was that now, when my sons no longer needed it, my love for them was unconditional. Sometimes, when either of my children came up against a thorny problem, I found myself worrying: did I give him what he needs to deal with this? Could I have done better? I could do better now, I thought. Now that it's too late.But when you speak of your sons it is always with admiration. Is it true you would like to return and do things that might change who they are?”

“As I set out each day, I felt like a young child again. One who hadn't yet learned the rules of manmade time; the rules of clocks and calendars, of weekdays and weekends. Except the primitive markers of day and night, time lay ahead of me in a continuous, undefined mass.”

“Women would be better off when they no longer needed men more than they needed their own independent identities...How long a time it took me after my divorce to understand that being alone is not the same as being lonely.”

“Women, I learned, adapted.At first..they seemed so fragile, so dependent on fathers and husbands and brothers and lovers. Gradually, though, I noticed how supple their lives were beneath the surface. Then I realized it was this flexibility that enabled them to survive...that sooner or later, by choice or by chance, most women faced the task of adapting to a future on their own. When at my most optimistic, I thought of it as independence; in darker moods, as survival. Either way women had to do it.”

“Life is like that I thought, as I turned the corner to my building. Freedom has its danger as well as its joys. And the sooner we learn to get up after a fall, the better off will be.”

“In many ways I was an independent woman. For years I'd made my own choices, paid my own bills, shoveled my own snow.”