I knew I would hate my best memory because it would prove that people could fake love or that love could end or worst of all, love was not powerful enough to change a life.

We all - in the end - die in medias res. In the middle of a story. Of many stories.

Fashion is what seems beautiful now but looks ugly later; art can be ugly at first but it becomes beautiful later.

Even as a feminist, my whole life I'd been waiting for a man to love, who could love me. For decades, I'd thought that man would be my father. When I was 25, I met that man and he was my brother.

Everybody in America grew up without a father even if they had one. It was the fifties. They were working.

Often, I think, displaced people imagine themselves leading double lives. So a portion of my identity has always been privately siphoned into what would have been if I had stayed in Wisconsin.

Once upon a time, my mother lived in the posh downtown of Homs, Syria. She described my grandfather as a king in a storybook, atop a horse, wearing a didashah and pointing a long arm.

Reading-not occasionally, not only on vacation but everyday-gives me nourishment and enlarges my life in mysterious and essential ways.

So many things that seemed crucial and excruciatingly hard ended and then didn't matter anymore, forever after

We come into the world whole, all of us, but we don't know that, don't know that life will be taking large chunks out of us, forever.

The first person besides my mother who believed in me was a man whose last name I never knew. He was my boss, the manager of Swenson's Ice Cream shop.

I'm not saying he was, like, crying tears of man pain over the phone, but he sounded upset.

Everything is possible in this world so don't fear anything

Don’t you have dragons to fight so that you started saving girls who don’t need it?

It's not just about waking up and trying to be a star... It's practice, practice, practice.

The camera adds a certain sheen to things. Something about being frozen in time really makes things sparkle.

Every great movement must experience three stages: ridicule, discussion, adoption.

Putts get real difficult the day they hand out the money.

I am an advocate of one form of the New Perspective. But there are as many new perspectives as there are people writing about it.

It's rare that you get to work with actors, female or not, where you all get along. Just because of the nature of humanity.

God…is the center of all selves.