Perhaps family itself, like beauty, is temporary, and no discredit need attach to impermanence.

Remember to breathe. It is after all, the secret of life.

Waking up was a daily cruelty, an affront, and she avoided it by not sleeping.

Indeed, she often wondered if she were dead, or dying from the inside out, and that was the root of her calm, the reason she could surrender her character.

Just my luck, if I believed in luck. I only believe in the opposite of luck, whatever that is.

The momentum of the mind can be vexingly, involuntarily capricious.

Are you an aberration to your species?' she cried. 'Cats don't look for approval!

And what new life can emerge from a book. Any book, maybe.

The future reshapes the memory of the past in the way it recalibrates significance: some episodes are advanced, others lose purchase.

We live in our tales of ourselves, she thought, and ignore as best we can the contradictions, and the lapses, and the abrasions of plot against our mortal souls...

When you can't die, she thought, everything sounds like a clock ticking.

She was as sated with him as he was tired of her. Emma had rediscovered in adultery all the banality of marriage.

A certain traveler who knew many continents was asked what he found most remarkable of all. He replied: the ubiquity of sparrows.

I have to say that the judges and our judiciary system makes better decisions than the politicians.

When the President starts talking about something, it makes a difference.

What I have learned from working with plants over the years is that the big leafed plants are the best to absorb the energy so I like philodendrons very, very much.

How do you get 'feng shui' out of 'thoughtful'?

If you complain about the world moving too fast, slow down.

Having a baby dragged me, kicking and screaming, from the world of self-absorption.

Books are immortal sons deifying their sires.

I feared disappointing my father more than anything in the world.