Valerie Martin

(A) trip to the attic is an excursion into history, and...all over the world the present unravels beneath the stored detritus of the past; that's what attics are for.

(M)uch as we might imagine we can leave the past behind, it has a nasty way of pressing its hoary old face against the window just as we were sitting down to the feast.

Everyone else felt the need to assure me that Mother's death was part of God's plan. Exactly, I wanted to shout after reading this sentiment half a dozen times--- his plan is to kill us all, and if an innocent child dies in agony and a wicked man breathes his last at an advanced age in his sleep, who are we to call it injustice?

I see I have this patience to wait it out, and the truth is no matter how dark I feel I would never take my own life, because when the darkness is over, then what a blessing is the feeblest ray of light!

One feels relieved these days when a play is not like television.

Actors are superstitious about beggars, perhaps because we're largely in the same line.

Self-inflicted pain has a calming effect; it clears the head, diminishes one's fascination with the ego, and most important, gives one the sense of having taken some real action against the everyday foolishness of the body and of the vagrant, willful, heedless imagination.