- Stories are how we make sense of our lives. To tell a story is to own it: to own the narrative thread to own a piece of our past. And when we own a story when we put it in a tidy box and store it on a high shelf it becomes manageable so that whatever negative effects it's been having on us are in theory lessened.
- I am nothing if not rational about what is worthy of my anxiety and what is not, and I refuse to live my life as if a giant bus is just around the corner, waiting to crush me the minute I step off the curb.
- If I've learned anything in the twenty-five years that have transpired between graduation and today it is this: I am stronger than I thought I was and weaker than I'd hoped to be, and in between those two extremes is a little thing called life.
- I loved to press the shutter, to freeze time, to turn little slices of life into rectangle rife with metaphor.
- I do miss the excitement of seeing history up close, of having intimate knowledge, through direct experience, of what happens when people and governments clash, but I do not miss the danger or the constant displacement.
- This is what sexism does best: it makes you feel crazy for desiring parity and hopeless about ever achieving it.
- When it comes down to it, I believe that, having made the decision to bring children into the world, I owe it to them to be as present as I can in their daily lives and to try my best to stay alive until they've made it through to adulthood.
- What other choice do we humans, still with breath, have? We can't go on. We must go on. We can't process the death of a child. We must speak of it anyway.
- All couples should have access to a legal expert who can help them through a divorce, step by step, as well as fair judges, such as the ones we were lucky enough to get, to dispense justice. But maybe the true administration of justice is, at a minimum, an ability for two people to amicably get divorced without breaking the bank or going to war.
- When it comes to writers, I'm a huge fan of Ian McEwan. I've never taken a writing course, but reading and deconstructing his novels has been as good a lesson as any.
- The point of diversity on a college campus, no matter its less-than-honorable roots, is not to count how many brown faces versus how many white and black faces a school has. It is to provide a rainbow of politics and upbringings and thought processes and understandings that might teach us, through our differences, how similar we are.
- No one's life turned out exactly as anticipated, not even for the most ardent planner.
- It's career suicide, colleagues tell me, to speak out against the literary establishment; they'll smear you. But never mind. I'm too old and too invisible to said establishment to care. And I still believe, as Carol Hanisch wrote back in 1969-when I was having my then three-year-old feet forced into stiff Mary Janes-that the personal is political.
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