Rachel’s Reviews > Outline > Status Update

“There was a great difference, I said, between the things I wanted and the things that I could apparently have, and until I had finally and forever made my peace with that fact, I had decided to want nothing at all.”

“It is interesting how keen people are for you to do something they would never dream of doing themselves, how enthusiastically they drive you to your own destruction: even the kindest ones, the ones that are most loving, can rarely have your interests truly at heart, because usually they are advising you from within lives of greater security and greater confinement.”

“One's existence as a wife and a mother, for example, is something often walked into without question, as though we are propelled by something outside ourselves; while a woman's creativity, the thing she doubts and is always sacrificing for the sake of these other things—when she wouldn't dream, for instance, of sacrificing the interests of her husband or son—has been her own idea, her own inner compulsion.”

“It seems success takes you away from what you know, he said, while failure condemns you to it.”