Just because you pretend the universe doesn't have teeth doesn't mean you won't get eaten in the end.

Was there anything quite so painful, so fraught with the possibilities of hurt, as gift giving within a family?

Soon would come the night in which there was no more work – not the work of the hands, nor the work of the mind, nor the work of the heart.

Still, for all that, her life had lacked passion. The demons had never come for her.

Education teaches children to lose interest in what matters most to them.

The body was an organic machine, period, and God was a figment of its fitful imagination.

But men are such strange creatures, really. I think most of them would rather we weren’t around at all, so they could just spend time mooning over each other. Hero worship and all that stuff.

The past is the past. It’s the present we should worry about.

It was a failure of pedagogical nerve, she reminded herself, to give up on a student.

All desire, Tracy had had occasion since to think, is to some degree monstrous.

I’m talking about other kinds of hunger. Desire.

I married the first man I ever kissed. When I tell this to my children they just about throw up.

If loving the written word is wrong...I don't want to be right!

I can see the beauty of glass objects fully at the moment when they slip from my hand

I love to see my family together. That's what life is about. It's about family.

There are always suicides among people who are unable to say what they mean.

If you catch me saying 'I am a serious actor,' I beg you to slap me.

Sometimes love needs a rest from caring, and so bears for an intolerable few hours the guilt of not caring.

Not everybody believes in ghosts, but I do. Do you know what they are, Trisha? She had shaken her head slowly. Men and women who can't get over their past . . . That's what ghosts are.

For me, comedy literally is way more terrifying than doing drama, so it's always about stretching what I think I can do and putting myself out there in different context.

I was very depressed after breaking off my engagement with Johnny ten years ago. I was embarrassingly dramatic at the time, but you have to remember I was only 19 years old.