I feel bad about my neck -- Nora Ephron

p.12
If you learn nothing else from reading this essay, dear reader, learn this: Never have an operation on any part of your body without asking a plastic surgeon to come stand by in the operation room and keep an eye out. Because even if you are being operated on for something serious or potentially serous, even if you honestly believe tht your health is moreimportant than vanity, even if you wakr up in the hospital room thrilled beyond imagining that it wasn't cancer, even if you feel elated, grateful to be alive, full of blinding insight about what's important and what's not, even if you vow to be eternally joyful about being on the planet Earth and promise never to complain about anything ever again, I promist you that one day soon, sooner than you can imagine, you will look in the mirror and think, I hate this scar.

p.66
But the other day, on the street, I passed a homeless woman. I have never understood the feminists who insisted they were terrified of becoming bag ladies, but as I watched this woman shuffle down the street, I finally understood at least my version of it. I don't want to be melodramatic; I am never going to become a bag lady. but I am only about 8 hours a week away from looking exactly like that woman on the street -- with frizzled flyaway gray hair I would probably have if I stopped dyeing mine; with a potbelly I would definitely develop if I ate just half of what I think about eating every day; with the dirty nails and chapped lips and mustache and bushy eyebrows that would be my destiny if I ever spent two weeks on a desert island.
Eight hous a week and counting. By the time I reach my 70s, I'm sure it will take at least twice as long. The only consolation I have in any of this is that when I'm very old and virtually unemployable, I will at least have something to do. Assuming, of course, that I haven't spent all mymoney doing it.

p.107-8
Why hadn't I left at the first whiff of the other woman's perfume? Why hadn't I realized how much of what I thought of as love was simply my own highly developed gift for making lemondade? What failuer of imagination had caused me to forget that life was full of other possibilities, including the possibility that eventually I would fall in love again?

p.144
This week, I heard from Ed Levine again. he emailedto say that Andre's hungarian bakery had opened a branchin Manhattan, on 2nd Ave and 55th St. it was selling cabbage strudel over the counter.