Like a Zen master, she reduced to the essences: I do not need to walk around the Museum of Fine Arts; I do not need to be pushed around the MFA in the chair; I do not need the MFA at all, because its...
It all came down to entitlement, and one's sense of it. Marina, feeling entitled, never really asked herself if she was good enough. Whereas he, Julius, asked himself repeatedly, answered always in th...
I don't want to sleep,' my mother said. 'I want -- for God's sake, I want to wake up.
Service is one of life's great joys. It's a privilege to be in service. It's a great relief, a gift, to be faced with a job that you know absolutely you must do for the benefit of someone else. As lon...
Just because someone tells you in a reasonable way that you aren’t really feeling what you’re feeling, it doesn’t make the feeling go away.
It shows how long-lived anger is, the desire for vengeance: it has a nuclear half-life, and it teaches people patience in the most sinister way.
It continued to amaze me how the touch of skin on skin had altered things: curled in the crook of his arm, my head upon his breast, I'd sensed his heart beating and for a moment hadn't been sure wheth...
I'm a good girl. I'm a nice girl. I'm a straight-A, strait-laced, good daughter, good career girl, and I never stole anybody's boyfriend and I never ran out on a girlfriend, and I put up with my paren...
I was funny—ha-ha, not peculiar. It was a modest currency, like pennies: pedestrian, somewhat laborious, but a currency nonetheless.
I needed them, sure, and we can all argue about the moment when the balance tipped and I needed them so much that I would hurt. But you can't pretend they didn't need me too, each in his or her way. T...
I kept thinking, as I was telling Didi, that somehow what was in my head--in my memory, in my thoughts--was not being translated fully into the world. I felt as though three-dimensional people and eve...
Have you ever asked yourself whether you’d rather fly or be invisible?
Don't all women feel the same? The only difference is how much we know we feel it, how in touch we are with our fury. We're all furies, except the ones who are too damned foolish, and my worry now is...
As my wise friend Didi has more than once observed about life's passages, every departure entails an arrival elsewhere, every arrival implies a departure from afar.
All those years we'd been friends, since forever, we'd used the same words and perhaps meant different things--sometimes slightly different, but other times radically dissimilar; and we'd never known...
Was suddenly aware, almost in a panic—a joyful panic—of the wealth of possibility out in the world, and also within myself.
There are social struggles, and the agonies and embarrassments of puberty...and the weight of the world that falls upon each of us in varying degrees, as we finally relinquish childhood's clouds of gl...
So: now a new year, a new beginning. I've vowed not to complain. I'm too good at it, and need to practice other skills. I've also vowed to work very hard...
For so long I had eaten my greens and here - at last! - was my ice-cream sundae.
For real?' Cassie's eyes glittered, and it occurred to me that all along she'd expected me to stop us. She'd goaded and teased me, made out like I was a wimp; but she also relied on me to keep us safe...