It is sad that unless you are born a god, your life,from its very beginning, is a mystery to you.
I was a new person then, I knew things I had not known before, I knew things that you can know only if you have been through what I had just been through.
No matter how happy I had been in the past I do not long for it. The present is always the moment for which I love.
Among the beliefs I held about the world was that being beautiful should not matter to a woman, because it was one of those things that would go away–your beauty would go away, and there wouldn’t be anything you could do to bring it back.
I began to feel alternately too big and too small. First, I grew so big that I took up the whole street; then I grew so small that nobody could see me — not even if I cried out.
That the world I was in could be soft, lovely, and nourishing was more than I could bear, and so I stood there and wept, for I didn’t want to love one more thing that could make my heart break into a million little pieces at my feet.
I liked that sentence then and I like that sentence now but then I had no way of making any sense of it, I could only keep it in my mind’s eye, where it rested and grew in the embryo that would become my imagination
I had begun to see the past like this: there is a line; you can draw it yourself, or sometimes it gets drawn for you; either way, there it is, your past, a collection of people you used to be
Who you are is a mystery no one can answer, not even you.
The inevitable is no less a shock just because it is inevitable.
I understood finding the place you are born in an unbearable prison and wanting something completely different from what you are familiar with, knowing it represents a haven.
What I don’t write is as important as what I write.
I love planting. I love digging holes, putting plants in, tapping them in. And I love weeding, but I don’t like tidying up the garden afterwards.