It's so internalized, the way your mind works in relation to anything - it's a process, but then it isn't. It's working all the time.

When I look at my old pictures, all I can see is what I used to be but am no longer. I think: What I can see is what I am not.

Home is where somebody notices when you are no longer there.

The perfect borscht is what life should be but never is.

Belief and delusion are incestuous siblings.

I am itching to criticize some well-regarded writers' works, but I am not doing it because I am perfectly aware that my critique could easily be reduced to envy or just plain meanness.

I gradually became aware that my interiority was inseparable from my exteriority, that the geography of my city was the geography of my soul.

I much preferred winning to thinking and I didn't like losing at all.

You don't want your neurosurgeon to have doubts about the meaning of it all while he or she is operating on your brain.

If you can't go home, there is nowhere to go, and nowhere is the biggest place in the world-indeed, nowhere is the world.

We knew - but didn't want to know - what was going to happen, the sky descending upon our heads like the shadow of a falling piano in a cartoon.

To live is so startling it leaves little time for anything else.

It may be a childish torment, but we do not get to choose our demons.

A liberated woman is one who feels confident in herself, and is happy in what she is doing. She is a person who has a sense of self-it all comes down to a freedom of choice.

Old Peter Grimes made fishing his employ; His wife he cabined with him and his boy, And seemed that life laborious to enjoy.

The best ideas I've had in my life are those I saw in my sleep, in the early morning.

If I can give you any advice, I beg you to get closer to the Eucharist and to Jesus... We must pray to Jesus to give us that tenderness of the Eucharist.

The foibles of my body are pretty much out there in the work I do.

Prayer is not so much about convincing God to do what we want God to do as it is about convincing ourselves to do what God wants us to do.

I actually love diving at night; you see a lot of fish then that you don't see in the daytime.

I am looking for suggestions on what we can do about extremists within our own society. They cannot be ignored.