He made me think of all the books I hadn't read, and all the ones I'd read but hadn't fully understood.

Maybe that's what we look for in the people we love, the spark of unhappiness we think we know how to extinguish.

When things don't go well, it helps to think of yourself as a genius and the rest of the world as a bunch of idiots.

Every minute we were together, I felt like I was wandering in the dark through a strange house, groping for a light switch. And then, whenever I found one and turned it on, the bulb was dead.

Sooner or later we all lose our loved ones. We all have to suffer, every last one of us.

I read 'The Great Gatsby' in high school and was hypnotized by the beauty of the sentences and moved by the story about the irrevocability of lost love.

Once you'd broken through that invisible barrier that separates one person from another, you were connected forever, whether you liked it or not.

It just took some people a little longer than others to realize how few words they needed to get by, how much of life they could negotiate in silence.

Apparently even the most awful tragedies, and the people they'd ruined, got a little stale after a while.

I don't really distinguish between sympathy and honesty when I'm writing. The two go together - I'm interested in inhabiting my characters, seeing the world through their eyes.

My novels are certainly more exciting than my own life.

My purpose of life is very simple

She was half running away from the hall, and she knew that she had done something cataclysmic, and she wanted nothing more than to be swallowed up by the darkness and to disappear forever.

Enough of this guilt, " he told her, his voice reduced to a cracked whisper. "What's done is done.

I graduated from high school early so I could move to New York to do 'A Little Night Music' out of the New York City Opera.

It's about labeling. For me feminism is bra-burning lesbianism. It's very unglamorous. I'd like to see it rebranded. We need to see a celebration of our femininity and softness.

When you introduce into our schools a spirit of emulation, you have present the keenest spur admissible to the youthful intellect.

I hate having people sit in on meetings.

Night breeds its own sort of anticipation.

Being a novelty had its advantages.

The historian does simply not come in to replenish the gaps of memory. He constantly challenges even those memories that have survived intact.