Emotions unreel in her like spools of cotton.

There will never come a time when I will be able to resist my emotions.

[She also tempers emotion with wry perspective. A woman driven to infamy by passion cannot have the man she loves.] As women have found since love began, ... she found she could live.

To join the company of women, to be adults, we go through a period of proudly boasting of having survived our own mother's indifference, anger, overpowering love, the burden of her pain, her tendency to drink or teetotal, her warmth or coldness, praise or criticism, sexual confusions or embarrassing clarity. It isn't enough that she sweat, labored, bore her daughters howling or under total anesthesia or both. No. She must be responsible for our psychic weaknesses the rest of her life. It is alright to feel kinship with your father, to forgive. We all know that. But your mother is held to a standard so exacting that it has no principles. She simply must be to blame.

A woman's body is the gate to this life. A man's body is the gate to the next life.

Women don't realize how much store men set on the regularity of their habits. We absorb their comings and goings into our bodies, their rhythms into our bones.