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She said, “Some are born bossy, some achieve bossiness, and some have bossiness thrust upon them.”

Fascination with horses predated every other single thing I knew. Before I was a mother, before I was a writer, before I knew the facts of life, before I was a schoolgirl, before I learned to read, I wanted a horse.

The novel is, above all, an intense experience of prolonged intimacy with another consciousness.

Two, she thought, was the most ephemeral age, the age of incipient consciousness, when personality was first chinking into place.

Failure was startling, really. So startling that I hardly noticed it at all.

He had accepted that if you were a bookish person the events in your life took place in your head.

My mind is like a room where the door swings free in the breeze, and many visitors come and go and stay and vanish as they will.

All I have is the knowledge that I saw! That I saw without being afraid and without turning away, and that I didn’t forgive the unforgivable. Forgiveness is a reflex for when you can’t stand what you know. I resisted that reflex. That’s my sole, solitary, lonely accomplishment.

Shame is a distinct feeling. I couldn’t look at my hands around the coffee cup or hear my own laments without feeling appalled, wanting desperately to fall silent, grow smaller. More than that, I was uncomfortably conscious of my whole body, from the awkward way that the shafts of my hair were thrusting out of my scalp to my feet, which felt dirty as well as cold. Everywhere, I seemed to feel my skin from the inside, as if it now stood away from my flesh, separated by a millimeter of mortified space.

Still others reflected on how quickly the food could be snatched from a man's table, or the child from a woman's breast, or the wife from a man's bedcloset, that no strength of grasp could hold these goods in place. And others remarked to themselves how sweet these goods were, in spite of that, and saw that pleasure lost in every moment is pleasure lost forever.

It was always and ever hard to tell with women why they chose one way and not another.

The fact is that the same sequence of days can arrange themselves into a number of different stories.