“I have no credentials. I have no money. I literally come from a poor place. I was a servant. I dropped out of college. The next thing you know I'm writing for the 'New Yorker,' I have this s...”

“I love planting. I love digging holes, putting plants in, tapping them in. And I love weeding, but I don't like tidying up the garden afterwards.”

“I loved Charlotte Bronte when I was little, and I wanted to be Charlotte Bronte the way people want to be a princess.”

“I was a new person then, I knew things I had not known before, I knew things that you can know only if you have been through what I had just been through.”

“No matter how happy I had been in the past I do not long for it. The present is always the moment for which I love.”