31 Quotes by Alice Steinbach

A letter is always better than a phone call. People write things in letters they would never say in person. They permit themselves to write down feelings and observations using emotional syntax far more intimate and powerful than speech will allow.

It is one of the strongest bonds, I think, that can spring up between people: sharing a passion for certain books and their authors.

I made dangerous choices in those years, thinking myself bold and adventurous. Later I would come to understand that I hadn't been daring at all, just driven by confusion and hormones. The person capable of true daring, I knew now, possessed two admirable qualities: curiosity and courage.

I suspected, however, that I wasn't homesick for anything I would find at home when I returned. The longing was for what I wouldn't find: the past and all the people and places there were lost to me.

As I set out each day, I felt like a young child again. One who hadn't yet learned the rules of manmade time; the rules of clocks and calendars, of weekdays and weekends. Except the primitive markers of day and night, time lay ahead of me in a continuous, undefined mass.

Freedom has its dangers as well as its joys. And the sooner we learn to get up after a fall, the better off we'll be.

And who's to say that just because something lasts only a short time, it has little value?

I suppose that, after the passion of love, water rights have caused more trouble than anything else to the human species.

At first the lives of women frightened me. They seemed so fragile, so dependent on fathers and husbands and brothers and lovers. Gradually, though, I noticed how supple their lives were beneath the surface. I saw, too, that sooner or later, by choice or by chance most women faced the task of adapting to a future on their own. When at my most optimistic, I thought of it as independence, in darker moods, as survival. Either way, women had to do it.