If you expect nothing from somebody you are never disappointed.
The silence depressed me. It wasn’t the silence of silence. It was my own silence.
I made a point of eating so fast I never kept the other people waiting who generally ordered only chef’s salad and grapefruit juice because they were trying to reduce. Almost everybody I met in New York was trying to reduce.
What a man is is an arrow into the future and what a woman is is the place the arrow shoots off from.
To the person in the bell jar, blank and stopped as a dead baby, the world itself is the bad dream.
There must be quite a few things a hot bath won’t cure, but I don’t know many of them.
There is something demoralizing about watching two people get more and more crazy about each other, especially when you are the only extra person in the room.
There is nothing like puking with somebody to make you into old friends.
That afternoon my mother had brought me the roses. “Save them for my funeral,” I’d said.
Physics made me sick the whole time I learned it. What I couldn’t stand was this shrinking everything into letters and numbers. Instead of leaf shapes and enlarged diagrams of the holes the leaves breathe through and fascinating words like carotene and xanthophyll on the blackboard, there were these hideous, cramped, scorpion-lettered formulas in Mr. Manzi’s special red chalk.
My mother’s face floated to mind, a pale, reproachful moon, at her last and first visit to the asylum since my twentieth birthday. A daughter in an asylum! I had done that to her. Still, she had obviously decided to forgive me.
My mother had taught shorthand and typing to support us ever since my father died, and secretly she hated it and hated him for dying and leaving no money because he didn’t trust life insurance salesmen.
