Life is not a harvest. Just because you have an apple doesn’t mean you have an orchard. You have an apple. Put a fence around it. Once you have put a fence around everything you value, then you have the total circle of your heart.

We tried not to smile, for smiling only encourages men to bore you and waste your time.

When I strip away my dreams, what I imagine to be my potential, all the things I haven't said, what I imagine I feel for other people in the absence of my expressing it, all the rules I've made for myself that I don't follow--I see that I've done as little as anyone else in this world to deserve the grand moniker I.

Women’s fiction” doesn’t sound like anything but a slur to my ears.

If now in some ways I drink too much, it’s not that I lack a reverence for the world.