Getting out of Russia was the best thing my parents did. I mean, that country will never amount to anything.

Reading is entering into the consciousness of another human being.

The love I felt for her on that train ride had a capital and provinces, parishes and a Vatican, an orange planet and many sullen moons -- it was systemic and it was complete.

If you stop thinking, if you stop wondering, you die.

The fading light is us, and we are, for a moment so brief (...) beautiful.

Good fiction makes me turn off all the other parts of my brain, so that I become quiet and submissive, entirely at the mercy of the work at hand.

She took my hand and pulled me after her, her shoulders giving off a sweet peppermint concoction that the bodies of young women sometimes produce to make my life more difficult.

If my mother hadn't tried to sell me chicken Kiev cutlets for $1.40 after I graduated from college, maybe I would've been the lawyer she wanted me to be.

You are not what you want. You are what wants you back.

Forget the fountain of youth, pal of mine. You can live to be a thousand, and it won't matter. Mediocrities like you deserve immortality.

If you read only one memoir by a disaffected, urban, 20-something Jewish girl this year, make it this one. Shukert rocks the lulav.

Sweetie, you don't need to drive me to the brink of insanity... I'm close enough to walk!

One day you'll be like me" is a waste to say. Instead you should "Someday you'll be better than me.

hermes has threatened me with slow mail. lousy Internet service and a horrible stock market if i publish this story. I hope he is just bluffing.

If Fortune calls offer him a seat.

I actually have a great deal of respect for antidepressants; I think they can be enormously mighty tools toward recovery.

Find the most delicate qualities within; then treat these qualities as tiny little seeds that you would plant in your heart, with you being the gardener.

If I am really a part of your dream, you'll come back one day.

Art is about energy positive and negative. All art has the power to heal because it helps us see who we are, and what we resist.

The Tsarnaev brothers, the elder brother made a public call to jihad and the [Barack] Obama administration didn't target it.

Physiology seeks to derive the processes in our own nervous system from general physical forces, without considering whether these processes are or are not accompanied by processes of consciousness.