Poverty, therefore, was comparative. One measured it by a sliding scale. One was always poor, in terms of those who were richer.

When nothing is sure, everything is possible.

How unjust life is, to make physical charm so immediately apparent or absent, when one can get away with vices untold for ever.

Family life itself, that safest, most traditional, most approved of female choices, is not a sanctuary: It is, perpetually, a dangerous place.

Scenery can be a violent stimulant.

Lord knows what incommunicable small terrors infants go through, unknown to all.

Novels, since the birth of the genre, have been full of rejected, seduced, and abandoned maidens, whose proper fate is to die.

The human mind can bear plenty of reality but not too much intermittent gloom.

The women are always vixens or monsters. They can't just be normal people in the book.

Nothing fails like failure

Why can't people be both flexible and efficient?

Just because you're beautiful and perfect, it's made you conceited.

We may have different backgrounds, but we believe in the same dream that says this is a country where anything's possible. No matter who you are. No matter where you come from.

Planning for the future without a sense of history is like planting cut flowers.

Sometimes, I'm too smart for my own good.

Nosegays! leave them for the waking, Throw them earthward where they grew Dim are such, beside the breaking Amaranths he looks unto. Folded eyes see brighter colors than the open ever do.

Setting up a college fund would be a great way to redirect the tangible evidence of Daddy's love.

There is no faculty of the human soul so persistent and universal as that of hatred.

I was out in L.A. and I had gone to film school and I was out here for a couple of years. For a lot of years, I was bartending and having a good time.

Ah, stupid, you know I love you, too.

He gave her a look that you could have poured on a waffle.