Then I thought of how my life at Ault was a series of interactions and avoidance of interactions in which I pretended not to mind that I was almost always by myself. I could not last for long this...

reason to do anything other than bypass and ignore. And

Sure, I believed the worst of myself but - not really. I was always waiting to be proven wrong.

People to whom a terrible thing has never happened trust fate, the notion that what's meant to be, will be. The rest of us know better.

I've never tried to assert my views unless they are self-evident, not reliant on an argument from me to prove or disprove them: Breast-cancer awareness and AIDS prevention are good. Illiteracy is bad....

Dispatches and warnings from this side of the fame fence tend to go ignored, dismissed as either whining or false modesty; if they weren't ignored, if people listened, no one would ever again seek...

I often messed up with people, it was true, but it rarely happened because I was reading them wrong; it was because I got nervous, or because I could see too clearly that I was not what they wanted....

It was more when things slowed down, during the parts when you were supposed to have fun, that my lack of friends felt obvious- on Saturday nights, when there dances I didn't go to, and during...

Either Ault was a lot harder than my junior high had been, or I was getting dumber- I suspected both. If I wasn't literally getting dumber, I knew at least that I'd lost the glow that surrounds you...

She was the reason I was a reader, and being a reader was what had made me most myself; it had given me the gifts of curiosity and sympathy, an awareness of the world as an odd and vibrant and...

Other people were so unsuccessful at fending off love! Members of Congress who had affairs with their aides, or students who I'd known in college, girls who as freshmen declared themselves lesbians,...

I cried because I knew for certain that I was leaving home, and abruptly, I did not know if it was such a good idea- I realized that I, like my parents, had never believed I'd actually go.

Coordinating the calendars of five men in their forties is like herding cats.

{as a single woman in my early thirties, I was careful not to coo excessively over other people's infants, lest it seem like I was telegraphing my desperation; the necessity of this precaution annoyed...

we create our own reality-that the truth, ultimately, is what we choose to believe.

Perhaps fiction has, for me, served a similar purpose-what is a narrative arc if not the imposition of order on disparate events?-and perhaps it is my avid reading that has been my faith all along.

The Wisconsin land, scraped and rearranged by glaciers, accosted by tornadoes, drenched and dried out and drenched again-it didn't care what I had done.

Rudolph Walsh, you are my fierce advocate, and your wit and wisdom