She was thirty-nine. No, she did not envy her eighteen-year- old self at all. But she did envy, envied every day more bitterly, that young girl's genuine independence, largeness, scope, and courage.

We use our parents like recurring dreams, to be entered into when needed.

A simple grateful thought turned heavenwards is the most perfect prayer.

Whatever you're meant to do, do it now. The conditions are always impossible.

If a fish is the movement of water embodied, given shape, then cat is a diagram and pattern of subtle air.

Every child has the capacity to be everything.

Any human anywhere will blossom in a hundred unexpected talents and capacities simply by being given the opportunity to do so.

What's terrible is to pretend that second-rate is first-rate. To pretend that you don't need love when you do; or you like your work when you know quite well you're capable of better.

Things are not quite so simple always as black and white.

You have to be grown up, really grown up, not merely in years, to understand your parents.

There is nothing more boring for an intelligent woman than to spend endless amounts of time with small children.

Nothing will unfold for us unless we move toward whatlooks to us like nothing: faith is a cascade.

Bad doesn't leave your life until you start consciously injecting good into your life through positive thinking.

He was very modest, but once he got talking, he liked reminiscing about all the people he worked with over the years.

With all fashion, what we do is play at being somebody else. We play at inhabiting another kind of world.

Writing, I think, is not apart from living. Writing is a kind of double living. The writer experiences everything twice. Once in reality and once in that mirror which waits always before or behind.

With wisdom fraught; not such as books, but such as practice taught.

The most important things in a friendship didn't have to be said out loud.

I'd give my right arm to be, like, a random extra on 'Girls,' just to walk past one of the scenarios. I'd love that more than anything.

The Conservative sees in the free market the harmony of interests and rules of cooperation that also underlie the civil society.

After you've been working fairly intensively on a novel for six months you never want to see the damn thing again.