"I promised myself that I would maintain momentum. "Maintain momentum" was the imperative that echoed all the way downtown. In fact I had no idea wha… - Joan Didion

The fear is for what is still to be lost.

To free us from the expectations of others, to give us back to ourselves — there lies the great, singular power of self-respect.

All one's actual apprehension of what it is like to be a woman, the irreconcilable difference of it — that sense of living one's deepest life underwater, that dark involvement with blood and birth and death — could now be declared in valid, unnecessary, one never felt it at all.