I think unknowing is the most important theological idea for me. Unlearning the things you think you know.

The problem with being a modern woman, I thought, as the front door swung wide, is that you have to pretend to be stronger than you are.

Everything was new, now I’m a junkie, I seem to need more severe doses of experience to feel anything.

When you write you have to reside in the unknown for as long as possible.

You’ll see, there are a million ways to kill off the soft parts of yourself.

I knew people want most what they pretend to hate, that it takes courage to say what you really want.

As a child I made a pact with my mother. I agreed that we were doomed, that she and I abided together in a cocoon of melancholy.

I knew you could find a certain relief in begging God, it had helped me, but on the other hand, God never answered directly and that was always depressing.

Maybe all spirits flew to Paris, not only French ones. Could you haunt a place you'd never been?

I spent so much time as a child thinking what if I was a robot, what if my mind were somewhere else? As a kid you're in the middle of all that.

A good biography is the richest experience. When you watch a TV series together with someone is like being in a novel with them.

I postpone death by living, by suffering, by error, by risking, by giving, by losing.

By the hairy balls of Jesus

I’ve tried being other people and myself suits me the best.

-tomorrow is our permanent address and there they’ll scarcely find us(if they do, we’ll move away still further:into now

Nobody can say a word against Greek: it stamps a man at once as an educated gentlemen.

Ah! how annoying that the law doesn't allow a woman to change husbands just as one does shirts.

There's apparently soccer leagues that they've set up with young Indian girls.

If a nation loses its storytellers, it loses its childhood.

Great Homer's birthplace seven rival cities claim, Too mighty such monopoly of Fame.

Nothing shakes my opinion of a book. Nothing -- nothing. Only perhaps if it's the book of a young person -- or of a friend -- no, even so, I think myself infallible.