The best thing about the iPhone is this that tells me where I am all the time. Theres never a need to feel lost anymore.

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.

As the waves relentlessly seek the shore, so my thoughts continually return to you.

Bare essentials. Like packing for paradise when you know you’re boarding the barge to hell.

The kitchen really is the castle itself. This is where we spend our happiest moments and where we find the joy of being a family.

Goodness, my nose is enormous,' she exclaimed. 'Why didn't anyone tell me?

What would dawn have been like, had you awakened? It would have sung through your bones. All I can do this morning is let it sing through mine.

Esteem never makes ingrates.

All good American literature is always interested in people who are ambiguously heroic, like Gatsby.

Education is the apprenticeship of life

We keep moving forward, opening up new doors and doing new things, because we're curious... and curiosity keeps leading us down new paths.