“And in taking on the subject of themselves-making themselves vulnerable to the unseen reader-they have exchanged powerlessness for for the power that comes with self-awareness.”

“It's like there's this wave coming toward me, but there's nothing I can do about it. And then it reaches me, crashes over me and...and I'm done for another day. I just give up. Give in to it. Because how do you stop a wave?You don't. And you're wise to recognize your powerlessness to do so. But what you can do is learn how to negotiate this wave. Work within the context of its inevitability.”

“I think... the secret is to just settle for the shape of your life takes...Instead of you know, always waiting and wishing for what might make you happy.”

“I started writing because of a terrible feeling of powerlessness," the novelist Anita Brookner has said. The National Book Award winner Alice McDermott noted that the most difficult thing about becoming a writer was convincing herself that she had anything to say that people would want to read. "There's nothing to writing," the columnist Red Smith once commented. "All you do is sit down at a typewriter and open a vein.”

“Power, wrongly used, defeats the oppressor as well as the oppressed.”

“God, that’s always the thing you have to decide with high school kids: what to make an issue of, what to let go.”

“Joy said she hadn't really understood the meaning of life until Tyffanie had come along, but now she understood it perfectly. Well, great, I felt like saying. Make sure you share the news with Plato and Kierkegaard and all those other philosophers who'd banged their heads against the wall, trying to figure things out.”