“I did believe, from my experience of life and of looking at the world, that men hated women.”

“I tried not to think about it. But every so often it would burst out of me - why did he do something so unkind? What had I done to deserve it? I did believe, from my experience of life and of looking at the world, that men hated women. But there were all kinds of exceptions, and I'd have bet everything that this man didn't hate me, this woman.”

“But you know, there's one simple thing I see absolutely clearly, now that I am so very old.I looked at her. The Albert Einstein hairstyle, and the bright black eyes and the sharp nose. That pallor on her face.She put her small hand on mine.The world is wonderful, she said. All its little things. It is wonderful.”

“My life burned inside me. Even such as it was, it was the only record of me, and it was my only creation, and something in me would not accept that it was insignificant.”

“They're fathers second, Jimmy said. They're men first.”

“Did anyone ever hear of an intelligent fantasy?”

“Permanence, I once copied down from a magazine, is what we all want when we can love and can be loved; change is what we want when we cannot.”