"When it comes time to do your own life, you either perpetuate your childhood or you stand on it and finally kick it out from under."
"The pity of living only once is that there is no way, ever, to be sure which sorrows are inevitable."
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Source: Rosellen Brown (1998). “Civil Wars”, Delta
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"Many of us write because we are readers and have grown up in a long tradition, and we want to be able to add to that extraordinary flow of interpretations of the world."
"One of the marvels of personality is its resistance to prediction. One man's paralyzing trauma is another man's invitation to take control of his life; one woman's grounds for insanity is another woman's ground to a dramatic shaping of self."
"Anne Pitkin's poems have such lyrical sweep, such a sensitive eye for the natural world as it touches the human, that reading Winter Arguments is like seeing a landscape or, better, a richly realized painting of a landscape dotted with figures. But that would leave out their music, which would be a loss. This is a wise and graceful book by a well-traveled woman who knows how to confront deep feeling and frame it to make it all the more intense."
"All schoolchildren are hostages to red tape and fiscal insufficiency."
"[On book promotion:] The reward for writing well appears to be not to be able to do it for a long time."