I Feel Bad About My Neck: And Other Thoughts on Being a Woman

by Nora Ephron

it means it’s not free for all sorts of exciting things you could be using it for, like shoving your way through crowds, throwing your arms around loved ones, climbing the greasy pole to success, and waving madly for taxis.

My guess is that by the time I’m eighty, I will be able to handle any offending hair on my legs with two plucks of an eyebrow tweezer.

The song has ended, but the melody lingers on, and that goes for the pain of labor—but not in a good way.

Reading is everything. Reading makes me feel I’ve accomplished something, learned something, become a better person. Reading makes me smarter. Reading gives me something to talk about later on. Reading is the unbelievably healthy way my attention deficit disorder medicates itself. Reading is escape, and the opposite of escape; it’s a way to make contact with reality after a day of making things up, and it’s a way of making contact with someone else’s imagination after a day that’s all too real. Reading is grist. Reading is bliss.

This usually involves dividing the cost of the item I can’t afford by the number of years I’m planning to use it, and if that doesn’t work, by the number of days or hours or minutes, until I get to a number that is less than the cost of a cup of cappuccino.)

Many years ago, when I was in analysis, my therapist used to say, “Love is homesickness.” What she meant was that you tend to fall in love with someone who reminds you of one of your parents.

Unrequited love’s a bore,

“Well, maybe someone will marry her for her personality.”

“I am led to the proposition that there is no fiction or nonfiction as we commonly understand the distinction; there is only narrative.”

If only one third of your clothes are mistakes, you’re ahead of the game.

If anyone young is reading this, go, right this minute, put on a bikini, and don’t take it off until you’re thirty-four.