In books I found explicitly, flamboyantly, everything censored in life.

Like the bodies of dancers or athletes, the minds of readers are genuinely happy and self-possessed only when cavorting around, doing their stretches and leaps and jumps to the tune of words.

I have done what people do, my life makes a reasonable showing. Can I go back to my books now?

what I love is slowness. Slow people, slow reading, slow traveling, slow eggs, and slow love. Everything good comes slow.

Getting away from being 'a good girl' is important because it's impossible to be a 'good girl' and a writer at the same time.

Reading. Reading was the stable backdrop against which my life was played.

How are we to spend our lives, anyway? That is the real question. We read to seek the answer, and the search itself--the task of a lifetime--becomes the answer.

Leave the dishes unwashed and the demands on your time unanswered. Be ruthless and refuse to do what people ask of you.

Nothing is as horrendous as imagining the times of happiness from an environment which is that of hell.

Parables, yes. We here are to lead life with woe. Tasting bitter.the Tai Chi instructor

Prayer is learning to know God.

Don’t discount this powerful use of appreciation. It is one of the great secrets of life. It’s the feeling and emotion of appreciation that matters most, not the lip service.

I just put the reflexes in the proper direction.

Failure is the only thing I've ever been a success at.

The goal is to turn data into information, and information into insight.

I believe that every people and every nation has the right to be free and independent.

Even in social life, it is persistency which attracts confidence, more than talents and accomplishments.

Having children made me confront my true fears and trust in God many times over in a much more intensified manner.

If most men and women were forced to rely upon physical charm to attract lovers, their sexual lives would be not only meager but in a youth-worshiping country like America painfully brief.

Some of the food in Liquor is food I've really eaten filtered through a veil of fiction.