She stared at her reflection in the glossed shop windows as if to make sure, moment by moment, that she continued to exist.

The only trouble was, Church, even the Catholic Church, didn’t take up the whole of your life. No matter how much you knelt and prayed, you still had to eat three meals a day and have a job and live in the world.

That’s one of the reasons I never wanted to get married. The last thing I wanted was infinite security and to be the place an arrow shoots off from. I wanted change and excitement and to shoot off in all directions myself, like the coloured arrows from a Fourth of July rocket.

sounded true, and I recognized it, the way you recognize some nondescript person that’s been hanging around your door for ages and then suddenly comes up and introduces himself as your real father and looks exactly like you, so you know he really is your father and the person you thought all your life was your father is a sham. ‘I don’t really know

The trouble was, I hated the idea of serving men in any way. I wanted to dictate my own thrilling letters.

Then I saw that my body had all sorts of little tricks, such as making my hands go limp at the crucial second, which would save it, time and again, whereas if I had the whole say, I would be dead in a flash. I would simply have to ambush it with whatever sense I had left, or it would trap me in its stupid cage for fifty years without any sense at a

felt like a racehorse in a world without race-tracks or a champion college footballer suddenly confronted by Wall Street and a business suit,

‘If neurotic is wanting two mutually exclusive things at one and the same time, then I’m neurotic as hell. I’ll be flying back and forth between one mutually exclusive thing and another for the rest of my days.’

I couldn’t stand the idea of a woman having to have a single pure life and a man being able to have a double life, one pure and one not.