Someone could save your life without you ever knowing it. It happened more than most people realized.

The moment a woman was born determined so much of who she was allowed to become.

Now she saw that marriage was like being in a three-legged race with the same person for the rest of your life. Your hopes, your happiness, your luck, your moods, all yoked to his.

She had learned over time that to know anything was bearable. It was secrecy that could not be borne.

It was amazing that you did not become your grief entirely, and walk about leaking it everywhere.

One of life's contradictions: how human beings were at once entirely resilient and impossibly fragile. One decision could stay with you forever, and yet you could live through almost anything.

Writing is easy. Writing a publishable book is hard.

Lord if you can't make me thin - can you make all my friends fat?

I don't write books inadvertently.

Notwithstanding all the wrongs that slavery heaped upon me, I can bless it for one thing-youth's important lesson of self-reliance.

Chess is an art and not a spectator sport.

I began teaching in New York because I needed to stay in the United States and didn't have my immigration papers in order, so working for a university was a way of resolving the issue.

Since I was young, the artistic expression that fashion embodies has inspired me. It's a way to communicate oneself.

I am quite strict as a dad but I don't want to be censorious.

I was enchanted by the escape into that meticulous world that seemed real yet not... well, it seemed not real, but very detailed and meticulous, bizarre.

You know, Alix, men suck. Really. They are the worst. Come with me. I need an estrogen fix before their chromosomal defects contaminate me any further. (Zarina)