No, I'm not clever. I've always cared more for people than for ideas.

She dares me to pour myself out like a living waterfall. She dares me to enter the soul that is more than my own; she extinguishes fear in mere seconds. She lets light come through.

A feminist is any woman who tells the truth about her life

One cannot think well, love well, sleep well, if one has not dined well.

A self that goes on changing is a self that goes on living.

I have a deeply hidden and inarticulate desire for something beyond the daily life.

I see you everywhere, in the stars, in the river, to me you're everything that exists; the reality of everything.

The only advice ... that one person can give another about reading is to take no advice, to follow your own instincts, to use your own reason, to come to your own conclusions.

No need to hurry. No need to sparkle. No need to be anybody but oneself.

Women have served all these centuries as looking glasses possessing the power of reflecting the figure of man at twice its natural size.

Lock up your libraries if you like; but there is no gate, no lock, no bolt that you can set upon the freedom of my mind.

Marriage is sleeping together in a bed a little too narrow.

Ego is the world's worst narcotic

Libraries are the latest fashion for the brain.

I hate parties. I don't like big crowded things.

People make a big fuss over you when you're President. But I'm very serious about doing everything I can to make sure that it doesn't go to my head.

The interaction of genetic and external influences makes my behaviour unpredictable, but not undetermined. In the gap between those words lies freedom.

I've always traveled. I'm a professor in a limited way. I teach one class two quarters out of four, so I get traveling done.

Struggling to stay in the middle class, and I love that. That's me and my dad and my family.

The six great gifts of an Irish girl are beauty, soft voice, sweet speech, wisdom, needlework, and chastity.