Books say: She did this because. Life says: She did this. Books are where things are explained to you; life is where things aren’t. I’m not surprised some people prefer books.
This was another of our fears: that Life wouldn’t turn out to be like Literature.
Women scheme when they are weak, they lie out of fear. Men scheme when they are strong, they lie out of arrogance.
To be stupid, and selfish, and to have good health are the three requirements for happiness – though if stupidity is lacking, the others are useless.
What you end up remembering isn’t always the same as what you have witnessed.
It strikes me that this may be one of the differences between youth and age: when we are young, we invent different futures for ourselves; when we are old, we invent different pasts for others.
The greatest patriotism is to tell your country when it is behaving dishonorably, foolishly, viciously.
Yes, of course we were pretentious – what else is youth for?
Sometimes I think the purpose of life is to reconcile us to its eventual loss by wearing us down, by proving, however long it takes, that life isn’t all it’s cracked up to be.
Women were brought up to believe that men were the answer. They weren’t. They weren’t even one of the questions.
I know this much: that there is objective time, but also subjective time, the kind you wear on the inside of your wrist, next to where the pulse lies. And this personal time, which is the true time, is measured in your relationship to memory.