Open Secrets

You cannot let your parents anywhere near your real humiliations.

Love dies all the time, or at any rate it becomes distracted, overlaid--it might as well be dead.

For what was living with a man if it wasn't living inside his insanity?

He could no more describe the feeling he got from her than you can describe a smell. It's like the scorch of electricity. It's like burnt kernels of wheat. No, it's like a bitter orange. I give up.

It was at this time that she entirely gave up on reading. The covers of books looked like coffins to her, either shabby or ornate, and what was inside them might as well have been dust.

You would think as you get older your mind would fill up with what they call the spiritual side of things, but mine just seems to get more and more practical, trying to get something settled.

There are times when girls are inspired, when they want the risks to go on and on. They want to be heroines, regardless. They want to take a joke beyond where anybody has ever taken it before. To be careless, dauntless, to create havoc--that was the lost hope of girls.

We have been very happy. I have often felt completely alone. There is always in this life something to discover. The days and the years have gone by in some sort of blur. On the whole, I am satisfied.