Eighty's a landmark and people treat you differently than they do when you're seventy-nine. At seventy-nine, if you drop something it just lies there. At eighty, people pick it up for you.

[On parents:] They're not gods to be pleased or devils to be exorcised. They're just there, and we can only hope they understand when we seem less than perfect. And try to understand, ourselves, when they're not all we'd like them to be.

Mail from home was so important when you were traveling. It kept you in touch with the familiar, even the part you were running from.

If arrogance is the heady wine of youth, then humility must be its eternal hangover.

Isn't it boring ... how people always want to tell you their own stories instead of listening to yours? I suppose that's why psychiatrists are better than friends the paid listener doesn't interrupt with his own experiences.

Emotion seemed more valid than experience, for I had so much of the former and so little of the latter.

Living would be a terribly pedestrian business without the impatient ones. The seekers. Always searching for something new, something relevant to leave their mark on. Always on tiptoe, anticipating discovery. Such people find change as necessary as the air they breathe.

When you get to be my age, all your friends have either died or moved to Florida.

I should coldly, clinically think of myself and stop worrying about other people, as though I'm a necessary woman, indispensable to their happiness and well-being. Self-preservation is the first law. I must start trying to obey the law.

People who let the weak or greedy drink their blood sometimes have a need to play God.