Sometimes, a stage curtain parts and you see: life could be better if you had more. Usually, I think, we can get just as good a different way. But tricks, they do not always work.

We all - in the end - die in medias res. In the middle of a story. Of many stories.

Fashion is what seems beautiful now but looks ugly later; art can be ugly at first but it becomes beautiful later.

Even as a feminist, my whole life I'd been waiting for a man to love, who could love me. For decades, I'd thought that man would be my father. When I was 25, I met that man and he was my brother.

Everybody in America grew up without a father even if they had one. It was the fifties. They were working.

Often, I think, displaced people imagine themselves leading double lives. So a portion of my identity has always been privately siphoned into what would have been if I had stayed in Wisconsin.

Once upon a time, my mother lived in the posh downtown of Homs, Syria. She described my grandfather as a king in a storybook, atop a horse, wearing a didashah and pointing a long arm.

Reading-not occasionally, not only on vacation but everyday-gives me nourishment and enlarges my life in mysterious and essential ways.

So many things that seemed crucial and excruciatingly hard ended and then didn't matter anymore, forever after

We come into the world whole, all of us, but we don't know that, don't know that life will be taking large chunks out of us, forever.

The first person besides my mother who believed in me was a man whose last name I never knew. He was my boss, the manager of Swenson's Ice Cream shop.

Life is the most amazing game. Play hard with a deep love so that you may enjoy it.

You can go from seeking to seeker when you stop bouncing. Set a plan for change and take the risks you need to take without worrying about failing.

One hair of a woman can draw more than a hundred pair of oxen.

Always be more than you appear and never appear to be more than you are.

What a wonderful thing is to be able to contribute to the restoration of someone's health. It's not only a feeling that I'm worth something, but that I have something to contribute.

Bob Dylan will be thirty years old this month..." "That's the most depressing thing I've ever heard.

Johnny Cash has only passed into the greater light. He will only become more important in this industry as time goes by.

I think in any writing you're paying attention to detail.

No one has seen God, but as we love one another, God lives in us.

Blind obedience in the name of patriotism or religion ultimately takes our lives.