“They call me the Joan of Arc in the family, and they're always saying, 'Mother's off on another one of her things. She's off fighting the world. She's off tilting at her windmills. But once they came to see the play, I think they understood what all those months [of study and rehearsal] had been about. I sat down with them at one point and told them I'd never finished anything in my life, although I'd started an awful lot of things. I said whether the play was a success or a failure didn't make any difference. What was important was that I finished it, because that element of not finishing projects is a failure in my character. And I think they understood that.”

“We went on the day on the boat train. I was 7, I had never seen a ship before. It looked very big. Everybody was very excited. We went down to the cabin and that's when my mother said to my father that she had made up her mind quite firmly that she would not go to bed in that ship. She would sit up at night. She decided that she wouldn't go to bed at night and she didn't!" I saw that ship sink, "I never closed my eyes. I didn't sleep at all. I saw it, I heard it, and nobody could possibly forget it." "I can remember the colours, the sounds, everything," she said. "The worst thing I can remember are the screams." "It seemed as if once everybody had gone, drowned, finished, the whole world was standing still. There was nothing, just this deathly, terrible silence in the dark night with the stars overhead." The band played one version of 'Nearer My God to Thee' of which there are three and the one they played was the one that was played in church."”

“I told her I had always lived alone and I probably always would
And all I wanted was my freedom
And she told me that she understood
But I let her do some of my laundry
And she slipped a few meals in between
And the next thing I remember, she was all moved in
And I was buying her a washing machine”

“I was not so sure, but Jem told me I was being a girl, that girls always imagined things, that’s why other people hated them so, and if I started behaving like one I could just go off and find some to play with.”

“Whoa!" she says as I plow into her. " What are you DOING? Get off me!" I hang on tight. "Can't a girl just hug her big sister?" She stops fighting me. "Are you dying? Am I dying? Did Grandma die? I laugh. "No one died." "Then get off!”

“In the beginning I used to make one terrible play a game. Then I got so I'd make one a week and finally I'd pull a bad one about once a month. Now, I'm trying to keep it down to one a season.”

“A woman told me her child was autistic, and I thought she said artistic. So I said, 'Oh great. I'd like to see some of the things he's done.”

“Perhaps I am like Carrie Jensen, the sister of one of my hired men. She had never been out of the cornfields, and a few years ago she got despondent and said life was just the same thing over and over, and she didn't see the use of it. After she had tried to kill herself once or twice, her folks got worried and sent her over to Iowa to visit some relations. Ever since she's come back she's been perfectly cheerful, and she says she's contented to live and work in a world that's so big and interesting. She said that anything as big as the bridges over the Platte and the Missouri reconciled her. And it's what goes on in the world that reconciles me.”

“The moment she was cursed, I lost her. Once it wears off- soon- she will be embarrassed to remember things that she said, things she did, things like this. No matter how solid she feels in my arms, she is made of smoke.”

“When she started to play, Steinway came down personally and rubbed his name off the piano.”