“...Though it seemed trivial, now, to describe a place as if what is was, was what I could see of it.”

“What makes a woman into a doormat? What makes her see some quite ordinary other person as a looming Goliath? And are not these relationships such an outrage to reality that they cannot last a lifetime?”

“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.”

“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.”

“But this upland pass was the right place for remembering how, when I was young, I learned to feel for the harshness underneath every soft appearance.”

“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.”

“..though silence must add intensity to your intimate moments, it must also shrivel your soul to lie beside someone who doesn't talk to you.”