I'm the fortieth ugliest man in this bar. But so what! So what!... Isn't this how people used to fall in love?

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.

How can I survive without a book to read?

How we need another soul to cling to.

I often say that shareholders should feel very responsible for how responsive corporations are to the public trust.

I just want to be as creative as I possibly can.

I always believe that if you feel good and look happy, you're always going to be beautiful. My one actual beauty trick is pretty cliche: Never, ever go to bed with your makeup on.

Never be a victim of life; be its conqueror.

We have, of course, long since ceased to think of Nature as the sympathetic mirror of our moods, or to imagine that she has any concern with the temporal affairs of man.

If someone does me injury I must desire that this injury shall not degrade me. I must desire this out of love for him who inflicts it, in order that he may not really have done evil.

I'll meet the raging of the skies, but not an angry father.

I don't like second place; I'm out there trying to win everything.