Catastrophe is numerical. Loss is singular, one beloved at a time.
One of the useful things about age is realizing conventional wisdom is often simply inertia with a candy coating of conformity.
Ignorance is death. A closed mind is a catafalque.
If men got pregnant, there would be safe, reliable methods of birth control. They’d be inexpensive, too.
I think the last couple of years of life for many, many people are the same as they were 50, 60, 70 years ago. They could be really tough because of infirmity.
Women are the glue that holds our day-to-day world together.
I’m writing this memoir from the perspective of somebody who’s prosperous and has means. Having said that, one of the things that I think I discovered about those additional years is that I don’t think they really are added to the end of life.
We don’t do ambivalence well in America. We do courage of our convictions. We do might makes right. Ambivalence is French. Certainty is American.
If we really feel like we’re comfortable in our own skins now, we have a longer period of time to live out that kind of third or fourth act of our life.
Look around at the azaleas making fuchsia star bursts in spring; look at a full moon hanging silver in a black sky on a cold night. And realize that life is glorious, and that you have no business taking it for granted.
I only really understand myself, what I’m really thinking and feelings, when I’ve talked it over with my circle of female friends. When days go by without that connection, I feel like a radio playing in an empty room.
So much of what you take for granted is the bedrock of happiness.
These are my words; this is their world, a world in which we can wear our gender on our sleeves, unabashedly, as we go about the business of thinking out loud.
I once wanted to be a personage. Now I am comfortable being a person.
When children are small, parents should run their lives and not the other way around.
All the things we don’t say, all the words we swallow, and it makes nothing but trouble.
Every reader, I suspect, has a book like this somewhere in his or her past, a book that seemed to hold within it, at that moment, all the mysteries of the universe.
We are writers. We danced with words, as children, in what became familiar patterns. The words became our friends and our companions, and without even saying it aloud, a thought danced with them: I can do this. This is who I am.
Your hair isn’t quite right and maybe you’re a size bigger than you should be and on and on and on. I think there comes a moment when you’ve matured to the point where you suddenly think, nonsense. I am fine just the way I am.
Being a reporter is as much a diagnosis as a job description.