He never seemed to grasp the immense mutability of human nature, nor to appreciate that behind every nondescript face lay a wild and unique hinterland like his own.

Birth and death: there was the same consciousness of heightened existence and of her own elevated importance

Sometimes, if she simply remained quiet, and let the inadequacy of his excuses reverberate on the air, he became ashamed and backtracked.

She seemed to think that one of the perks of marriage was that it gave you rights of comment and intrusion over single people's love lives.

He gave everything to everybody. Except to me.

Choice was dangerous: you had to forgo all other possibilities when you chose.

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.

What's Princeton doing today?

I have emotional needs that I didn't know I had, and I have physical needs that I didn't know weren't really needs.

I don't build a house without predicting the end of the present social order.

There is a great life-giving, warming power called Love, which exists in human hearts dumb and unseen, but which has no real life, no warming power, till set free by expression.

I've always believed that you can funnel good things toward yourself by thinking positiviely.

I write every morning. Two hours. Then I take a break and become my own secretary for a few hours. If I am "hot" I write in the afternoon and at night too.

You should be careful about who you pretend to be, because who you pretend to be - is actually who you are!

You've got to be smart enough to write and stupid enough to not think about all the things that might go wrong.

In the Church, considered as a social organism, the mysteries inevitably degenerate into beliefs.

All of us are made up of the stories that we listen to, the ones we disagree with and the ones that we agree with.