When you take things personally, she knew, the world becomes very small. It is you and nothing is smaller. When you manage not to do that, the world opens wide.

You stand next to the sea and you’re in touch with all your longings and all your losses.

Movement always helps. A world of thoughts occurred to her whenever she rode a train, and a lesser world whenever she went for a walk.

And when is it ever convincing, the belief others have in your abilities? You know perfectly well they can’t see the mess inside you.

How attraction works, making one’s body almost painfully alive and one’s thoughts concentrated, also painfully. And the truth of these powerful attractions – they have their own morality and nothing else matters.

She would always be living her life backwards, she realized, trying to regain something perfect that she’d lost.

A child lies like a grey pebble on the shore until a certain teacher picks him up and dips him in water, and suddenly you see all the colours and patterns in the dull stone, and it’s marvelous for the stone and marvelous for the teacher.

She would always be careful around people like Parley Burns, tricky people who are thin skinned and punitive and intelligent and surprisingly honest.

The studio was connected by a picture window to master control, which was connected in the same way to the announce booth and the editing booth beyond that. She could see the length of the little station and into the hallway, too. And thus she was inducted into the visibility and invisibility of radio, the intimacy and the isolation.

We look so very different from the way we sound. It’s a shock, similar to hearing your own voice for the first time, when you’re forced to wonder how the rest of you comes across if you sound nothing like the way you think you sound. You feel dislodged from the old shoe of yourself.