One of the strengths I derive from my class background is that I am accustomed to contempt.

Two or three things I know for sure, and one of them is that if we are not beautiful to each other, we cannot know beauty in any form.

Change, when it comes, cracks everything open.

Things come apart so easily when they have been held together with lies.

Fiction is a piece of truth that turns lies to meaning.

Two or three things I know for sure, and one of them is the way you can both hate and love something you are not sure you understand.

I did not begin with craft, I began with strong feelings and worked toward craft.

Class, race, sexuality, gender and all other categories by which we categorize and dismiss each other need to be excavated from the inside.

The only magic we have is what we make in ourselves, the muscles we build up on the inside, the sense of belief we create from nothing.

I have wanted everything as a writer and a woman, but most of all a world changed utterly by my revelations.

I am the only one who can tell the story of my life and say what it means.

But, really, are there any guys out there who aren’t jerks? I don’t even know any grown-up men who aren’t jerks.

Who sows virtue reaps honor.

I had piano lessons when I was younger, but I quit because I didn't want to sit and learn the scales.

I think we'll build a consensus for action on Social Security reform which will reduce that long-term unfunded obligation and put the system on a sustainable basis.

To be able to enjoy one's past life is to live twice.

If you're afraid to die, you're afraid to live. You can't have one without the other.

It almost seems that if you can describe it, you can change it.

How far have I to go to find you in whom I have already arrived.

The unutterable violence of the Holocaust shook our confidence in the possibility of telling any story of faith at all.

A marriage, even one that goes awry, generates claims and needs that persist like an afterglow long after the emotional fire is burned out.