I've gone through a lot of stuff in my life so far. There are stories I haven't really been able to tell.
I felt like that growing up - that I didn't have a voice.
Parents don't reveal how often they have bitten their tongue, fought back the tears, or been too tired to take off their clothes after a day of childcare. The parent loves, but they do not expect the favour to be returned in any significant way.
You never know what's going on in someone's life. You never know what's really going on behind what they present.
Each of us keeps, battened down inside himself, a sort of lunatic giant; impossible socially, but full scale; and it's the knockings and battering we sometimes hear in each other that keep our banter from utter banality.
I like repressed characters. That gives me a lot of freedom to make a lot of different choices through subtleties.
Silence is deeply woven into the fabric of female experience.
There's no way to know exactly what someone's dealing with, no matter how open you are. You're just never going to know everything.
Nobody, who has not been in the interior of a family, can say what the difficulties of any individual of that family may be.
People say nice things about me but they don't know what's been going on between my ears.
The invisible dilemma is that men face the very real problem that they don't feel comfortable bringing these issues up and they tend not to be acknowledged at work.
I sing about the things that I don't have conversations about.
As a woman, and as a working mom trying to get things done, you find yourself meeting adversity a lot, but you never talk about it because you don't want to bring attention to it. You don't want to go there.
Growing up, I never expressed myself to nobody. I never told nobody when something was wrong.
I was very independent growing up, but there were things that were bothering me that I never told anybody. I would talk to our animals at home.
Women sometimes seem to share a quiet, unalterable dogma of persecution that endows even the most sophisticated of them with the inarticulate poignancy of the peasant.
I am interested in the gap between what people say and what they think - the undiscovered world of people's lives. Lives of quiet desperation.
I like people a lot, but I am not comfortable in literary New York situations. There is deep anxiety and tension around success here. I don't share problems I'm having about my work, and I think conversations around publishing are boring.
There are wounds of self-love which one does not confess to one's dearest friends.
Most men have an insecurity of some sort. But we're brought up to believe that we can't show them.
The bosom can ache beneath diamond brooches; and many a blithe heart dances under coarse wool.
The big dramas that fascinate me are the quiet ones that happen behind closed doors in so-called ordinary families.
We all have secret lives. The life of excretion; the world of inappropriate sexual fantasies; our real hopes, our terror of death; our experience of shame; the world of pain; and our dreams. No one else knows these lives. Consciousness is solitary. Each person lives in that bubble universe that rests under the skull, alone.
People say things unintentionally, not realizing that it could hurt someone's feelings because they've just never experienced what you have.
I was born in 1947, and my generation, like its predecessors, was taught that since our achievements received little notice or credit from white America, we were not to discuss our faults, lapses, or uncertainties in public.
