Sublime

a woman. She also understood that it was no compliment. Any woman who doesn’t give a fuck is simply abandoning her soul to adhere to the rules. No woman on earth doesn’t give a fuck—no woman is that cool—she’s just hidden her fire. Likely, it’s burning her up.

inchoate

But still, it heartened me to know that my departure from Alexander’s life had wounded him so thoroughly that he felt the need to sabotage me, and it took a long while for me to kill the urge to wound him back. I had never considered using the auspices of certain so-called feminist sex-panic movements to try to destroy his career, although I had

Those experiments seemed to last forever: would I be this kind of person, or that? Live this way? Or that? Each friendship felt at the time like the one true one, the entry into the life I was meant to live. Each time I failed to understand the lives of my friends and their families. Nor did I grasp my effect (pernicious, for the most part) on

The self without sympathetic attachments is either a fiction or a lunatic…. [Yet] dependence is scorned even in intimate relationships, as though dependence were incompatible with self-reliance rather than the only thing that makes it possible.

strident:

Refusing to take up the burden of how one’s art may make innumerable, heterogeneous, essentially uncontrollable others feel does not to me signify ethical failure.