But when it came right down to it, the skin of my wrist looked so white and defenseless that I couldn't do it.

The trouble with jumping was that if you didn't pick the right number of stories, you might still be alive when you hit bottom.

Look what can happen in this country, they'd say. A girl lives in some out-of-the-way town for nineteen years, so poor she can't afford a magazine, and then she gets a scholarship to college and wins a prize here and a prize there and ends up steering New York like her own private car.

There would be a black, six-foot-deep gap hacked in the hard ground. That shadow would marry this shadow, and the peculiar, yellowish soil of our locality seal the wound in the whiteness, and yet another snowfall erase the traces of newness in Joan's grave.

I'd discovered, after a lot of extreme apprehension about what spoons to use, that if you do something incorrect at table with a certain arrogance, as if you knew perfectly well you were doing it improperly, you can get away with it and nobody will think you are bad-mannered or poorly brought up.

This seemed a dreary and wasted life for a girl with fifteen years of straight As, but I knew that's what marriage was like, because cook and clean and wash was just what Buddy Willard's mother did from morning till night, and she was the wife of a university professor and had been a private school teacher herself.

Almost all the people I met in New York were trying to reduce.

The journey over the bridge had unnerved me. The river water passed me by like an untouched drink. I suspected that even if my mother and brother had not been there I would have made no move to jump.

Love set you going like a fat gold watch. The midwife slapped your footsoles, and your bald cry Took its place among the elements.

What is so real as the cry of a child?