“4/16/85: If I were thin, I’d never say “I am powerless over fudge.”a) I can’t believe I actually ever said that. b) Which, of course, isn't to say that I do have any power over fudge. Particularly if it has nuts.”

“Try as I might, I couldn't destroy my spirit. And try as I might, I couldn't change who I was. I was left with what to me seemed to be the most difficult option: loving myself just the way I am.”

“To sit down so often with nothing to say,-to say something so often, almost without consciousness of saying and without any remembrance or having said,-is a power of which I will not violate my modesty by boasting; but I do not believe everyone has it.”

“I hauled myself over as if I were mounting a horse. Which I'd never actually done before.Needless to say, it was hardly a graceful affair.”

“I never had, or wished for, power over you. That isn't true, of course. I wanted the greatest power of all. but not advantage, or authority.”

“I was actually going out of the hospital with two whores on a fishing boat; I had to keep saying it over and over to myself to believe it.”

“Make them do as you want them to," she said."I can’t," mourned Anne. "Averil is such an unmanageable heroine. She will do and say things I never meant her to. Then that spoils everything that went before and I have to write it all over again.”