"Only help her to believe – help make it so there is cause for her to believe that she is more than this dress on the ironing board, helpless before the iron."
"She was dark and thin and foreign-looking in a world where the prestige went to blondness and curly hair and dimples, slow where glibness was prized."
"So all that is in her will not bloom – but in how many does it?"
"I was nineteen. It was the pre-relief, pre-WPA world of the depression."