I feel safe with him because he is so not my ideal and I feel like I can be myself because I'm not in love with him.

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.

Stop feeling sorry for yourself and get to work, your future lies ahead of you

With profound love, kindness, and harmony trees are endlessly extending their blessings. That is why we are still living.

You only live when you truly get lost in love.

There’s more to honesty than … than an arrangement of words. They say faeries can’t lie, but you lie in your intentions, your attitude, your demeanor —

I had my trousers on at all times.

Magnanimity is above circumstance; and any virtue which depends on that is more of constitution than of principle.

If you want to have sustained joy, you have to not only make sure that you think right, but you also have to make decisions now that are going to guarantee some joy in the future.

Work seemed something fundamental for man, something which enabled him to endure the aimless flight of time.

You don't have to want death in order to prepare for it.

I make stupid errors because I don't concentrate. I let things bother me.