People who say that so-and-so is "in a rut" and that something should be done about it are often the sort who will watch an ant working contentedly and then devise cunning obstructions to throw it off the track. Their idea that being in a rut is automatically terrible, either frustrating or deadening, is nonsense. There are good ruts and bad ones, and to an outsider they may look as alike as two pea-pods, but the person in the rut knows the difference. Those of us lucky enough to have fallen into the right rut-- compatible in shape, scenery, direction or lack of direction-- don't take kindly to change. In my own case, my surroundings and methods of working suit me so exactly that once when a prop was changed, the result was disastrous.

-- from "Pack Your Troubles and Sag"

Gradually, we began to think our new sister wasn't too bad. It's true that she was awfully dumb about talking-- at twelve months Bobby and I had given her up as a moron-- but she cooed prettily when she wasn't screaming or sleeping. When the baby was about eighteen months old, Paige and I were allowed to wheel her down Buffalo Street every afternoon after school. It got to be quite a game, after we had worked out three speeds for pushing the carriage. Speed One was sedate, a slow crawl , and used exclusively if our mothers happened to be sitting on the front porch. Two was brisker, but Speed Three was really a honey.

"Now Three," I would yell, and we'd charge downhill with the baby carriage at break-neck speed, like runaway horses. My little sister seemed enchanted with this, and when Paige and I would stop at the foot of the hill panting, she'd gurgle for more. However, for several years after this, she was an extremely nervous, high-strung child, and sometimes I think I know why.

--from We Shook the Family Tree (1946)

At thirty-three, she had pushed herself into thinking like a wryly amused spinster as part of her careful pattern of convalescing, of making sure she'd never be struck down again by youthful emotions. But even when she had first come to New York and moved into the brownstone on Ninth Street, she had never identified herself with the girls in the apartment upstairs. They seemed to her as flighty and chattery as starlings.

There were always three of them in the floor-through apartment, but never the same three for long. Every time one got married and moved out, another one moved in. Most of the newcomers would come to her door smiling prettily, wanting extra ice cubes, or to chat with the only other tenant near their own age. They go the ice cubes and pleasant words, but they never got beyond the foyer. The way she turned herself off was a subtler form of the householder's dousing all the lights as a caller comes up the walk.

from Open the Door (1966)