Of course I didn't pioneer the use of food in fiction: it has been a standard literary device since Chaucer and Rabelais, who used food wonderfully as a metaphor for sensuality.

She always had that about her, that look of otherness, of eyes that see things much too far, and of thoughts that wander off the edge of the world.

Happiness. Simple as a glass of chocolate or tortuous as the heart. Bitter. Sweet. Alive.

It isn't just a village. The houses aren't just places to live. Everything belongs to everybody. Everyone belongs to everyone else. Even a single person can make a difference.

I let it go. It's like swimming against the current. It exhausts you. After a while, whoever you are, you just have to let go, and the river brings you home.

A man may plant a tree for a number of reasons. Perhaps he likes trees. Perhaps he wants shelter. Or perhaps he knows that someday he may need the firewood.

I've never been very good at leaving things behind. I tried, but I have always left fragments of myself there too, like seeds awaiting their chance to grow.

I have an advanced degree in procrastination and another one in paranoia.

Some people spend the whole of their lives sitting waiting for one train, only to find that they never even made it to the station.

Life is what you celebrate. All of it. Even its end.

If wishes were horses, beggars would ride.

Immoral women do not exist", said the organist. "That this only a superstition. On the other hand there exist women who sleep thirty times with one man, and women who sleep once with thirty men.

It always does seem to me that I am doing more work than I should do. It is not that I object to work

For the first time in four billion years a living creature had contemplated himself and heard with a sudden, unaccountable loneliness, the whisper of the wind in the night reeds.

Good-humor is the clear blue sky of the soul.

You cannot limit the power of your modesty to just what you wear. It is also controlled or forfeited by where you are willing to go with guys, why you go there, and how you act.

We ought to flee the friendship of the wicked, and the enmity of the good.

Anybody can be Prince Charming one day a year, with the dinner and the flowers and all that. But you know what impresses me? When a guy can do that NO days a year.

The data is going to indicate sadly that when the Obama administration is over, black people will have lost ground in every single leading economic indicator category.

Provocation polio. That is the truth about those outbreaks of polio. And I offer a well considered personal opinion that polio is a man made disease.