I was numb, but it was from not knowing just what this new life would hold for me.

I have no credentials. I have no money. I literally come from a poor place. I was a servant. I dropped out of college. The next thing you know I'm writing for the 'New Yorker,' I have this sort of life, and it must seem annoying to people.

The inevitable is no less a shock just because it is inevitable.

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.

What distinguished my life from my brother's is that my mother didn't like me. When I became a woman, I seemed to repel her.

The English language started out as a distortion in my life, but nothing remains the same, and so the distortion is now just normal. That is one of the things that will happen to all distortions: They become normal and turn into something else.