The humming of my parents' voices from behind my bedroom wall, which throughout my childhood had filled me with a sense of security, had now become a source of anxiety and panic.

We knew, finally, that the girls were really women in disguise, that they understood love and even death, and that our job was merely to create the noise that seemed to fascinate them.

Biology gives you a brain. Life turns it into a mind.

When I wrote The Virgin Suicides, I gave myself very strict rules about the narrative voice: the boys would only be able to report what they had seen or found or what had been told to them.

Basically what we have here is a dreamer. Somebody out of touch with reality. When she jumped, she probably thought she'd fly

It was one of those humid days when the atmosphere gets confused. Sitting on the porch, you could feel it: the air wishing it was water.

In the end, the tortures tearing the Lisbon girls pointed to a simple reasoned refusal to accept the world as it was handed down to them, so full of flaws.

Depression is like a bruise that never goes away. A bruise in your mind. You just got to be careful not to touch it where it hurts. It's always there, though.

You never get over it, but you get to where it doesn't bother you so much.

It was like autumn, looking at her. it was like driving up north to see the colors.

She held herself very straight, like Audrey Hepburn, whom all women idolize and men never think about.

The focusing of attention on the breath is perhaps the most universal of the many hundreds of meditation subjects used worldwide.

Leadership is an art expressed by the demonstration of characters worthy of immitation, emulation and inspiration. It is neither a title nor a postion.

I'm afraid men are not always quite as clever as they think they are. You will learn that when you get a bit older, my girl.

Love ... was part imagination, its web spun as much in the dark lonely separated evenings of longing as in the shared times together.

What sinks the devil sails the Christian.

Like birds whose wings are broken, you live without direction!

If I need to bulk up for a role, I will do more weights. If I need to slim down for something, I will do more cardio. That's usually how it goes.

This is the method of genius, to ripen fruit for the crowd by those rays of whose heat they complain.

It does not matter where you come from, if you walk toward the truth you will reach it, whatever path you take.

It's important for a woman to feel good in her clothes. It's OK to have curves and to work them.