“You think that what I've told you is an anecdote. But really it isn't. It's my whole life. It's the only story I have.”

“Anyway, what I've just told you was what prompted the chair incident. I had grown big, and he was trying to belittle me.”

“As the poet says, all happy couples are alike, it's the unhappy ones who create the stories. I'm no longer a story. Happiness has made me fade into real life.”

“On the first floor near the foot of the stairs, we have placed on the wall an antique mirror so old that it can't reflect anything anymore. Its surface, worn down to nubbled grainy gray stubs, has lost one of its dimensions. like me, its glimmerless. You can't see into it now, just past it. Depth has been replace by texture. The mirror gives back nothing and makes no productive claim upon anyone. The mirror has been so completely worn away that you have to learn to live with what it refuses to do. That's its beauty.”

“Every relationship has at least one really good day. What I mean is, no matter how sour things go, there's always that day. That day is always in your possession. That's the day you remember. You get old and you think: well, at least I had that day. It happened once. You think all the variables might just line up again. But they don't. Not always. I once talked to a woman who said, "Yeah, that's the day we had an angel around.”

“I don't think that most women have to prove that they're real women. You live long enough, you graduate to being real.”

“There is such a thing as the poetry of a mistake, and when you say, "Mistakes were made," you deprive an action of its poetry, and you sound like a weasel.”