“There was no one to call me to bed, no one to demand that the rhythms of my life operate in a duet.”

“ONE THING I AM NEVER GOING TO DO WHEN I GROW UPIs fall in love, drop out of college, learn to subsist on water and air, have a species named after me, and ruin my life.”

“Now that mine is almost over, I can say that the one thing that struck me most about life is the capacity for change. One day you're a person and the next day they tell you you're a dog. At first it's hard to bear, but after a while you learn not to look at it as a loss. There's even a moment when it becomes exhilarating to realize just how little needs to stay the same for you to continue the effort they call, for lack of a better word, being human.”

“I simply came to believe that one, the factual circumstances of my life were almost accidental and didn't grow out of my own soul, and two, I possessed something unique, a special strength and depth of feeling that would allow me to withstand the hurt and injustice without being broken by it”

“. . . to survive the dark and often terrifying passage of my life I came to believe certain thing about myself . . . I simply came to believe that one, factual circumstances of my life were almost accidental and didn't grow out of my own sould, and two, I possessed something unique, a special strength and depth of feeling that would allow me to withstand the hurt and injustice without being broken by it.”

“I opened my mouth, but nothing came out. It took seven languages to make me; it would be nice if I could have spoken just one.”

“Because it hardly ends with falling in love. Just the opposite. I don't need to tell you, Your Honor, I sense that you understand true loneliness. How you fall in love and it's there that the work begins: day after day, year after year, you must dig yourself up, exhume the contents of your mind and sould for the other to sift through so that you might be known to him, and you, too, must spend days and years wading through all that he excavates for you alone, the archaeology of his being, how exhausting it became, the digging up and the wading through, while my own work, my true work, lay waiting for me. Yes, I always thought there would be more time left for me, more time left for us, and for the child we might one day have, but I never felt that my work could be put aside as they could, my husband and the idea of our child, a little boy or girl that I sometimes even tried to imagine, but always only vaguely enough that he or she remained a ghostly emissary of our future, just her back while she sat playing with her blocks on the floor, or just his feet sticking out of the blanket on our bed, a tiny pair of feet. What of it, there would be time for them, for the life they stood for, the one I was not yet prepared to live because I had not yet done what I had meant to do in this one.”