“Dear girl! Life is addictive. Yet we must live.”

“Our lives can only be interpreted in retrospect, yet must be lived from day to day, blindly. What folly, the human condition!”

“Even if I seemed to remember, I could not know. For just to remember something is not to know if it really happened. That is a primary fact of the inner life, the most difficult fact with which we must live.”

“Where there must be a choice, a girl will choose Daddy. Even if you are Mommy, you concede that this must be so: you remember when you were a girl, too.”

“Whoever's reading this, if anyone is reading it: does it matter that our old selves are lost to us as surely as the past is lost, or is it enough to know yes we lived then, and we are living now, and the connection must be there? Like a river hundreds of miles long exists both at its source and at its mouth, simultaneously?”

“Which is why we say I can't live without you meaning your life gives life to me, who am otherwise an empty vessel, nameless.”

“The fact was that the woman lived the life she chose, she was happy in that life and it was no one's business after all but her own, my uncle's face darkening with blood as he spoke, my mother's fair fine skin pink as if smarting yet still I persisted, for I thought it such a horror, such a grief, yes and an embarrassment too, I said, "She's made a prison of this house, it's like she's a nun, it must be to punish herself," and my mother said quietly, angrily, "You don't know - what do you know! People do what they want to do.”