That's what tyrants do, I guess. They make you covet their attention; they make you confuse attention for mercy.

Reading is entering into the consciousness of another human being.

The love I felt for her on that train ride had a capital and provinces, parishes and a Vatican, an orange planet and many sullen moons -- it was systemic and it was complete.

If you stop thinking, if you stop wondering, you die.

The fading light is us, and we are, for a moment so brief (...) beautiful.

Good fiction makes me turn off all the other parts of my brain, so that I become quiet and submissive, entirely at the mercy of the work at hand.

She took my hand and pulled me after her, her shoulders giving off a sweet peppermint concoction that the bodies of young women sometimes produce to make my life more difficult.

If my mother hadn't tried to sell me chicken Kiev cutlets for $1.40 after I graduated from college, maybe I would've been the lawyer she wanted me to be.

You are not what you want. You are what wants you back.

Forget the fountain of youth, pal of mine. You can live to be a thousand, and it won't matter. Mediocrities like you deserve immortality.

If you read only one memoir by a disaffected, urban, 20-something Jewish girl this year, make it this one. Shukert rocks the lulav.

We cannot shake off three hundred years of fear in three hours.

For somehow this is tyranny's disease, to trust no friends.

When your thoughts, words, and deeds form a seamless fabric, you streamline your efforts and thus eliminate worry and dread.

No sooner do we think we have assembled a comfortable life than we find a piece of ourselves that has no place to fit in.

I thought weirdness was a good thing. I don't mean that defensively, either. I thought it was something to be cultivated.

I don't keep up on a lot of the business trends.

The first line (of I Am The Walrus) was written on one acid trip one weekend. The second line was written on the next acid trip the next weekend, and it was filled in after I met Yoko.

The attitude of the Catholic Church towards homosexuality is well known - it is treated as something unnatural, even as a disease.

It's unreal. I mean, the dog backflips. It's amazing. Google Jumpy on YouTube - I had seen the dog first and I was like, "Y'all don't even know."

Let us never forget the greatest untapped market for American enterprise is right here in America, in the inner cities, in the rural areas.