The streets of London have their map, but our passions are uncharted. What are you going to meet if you turn this corner?

She dares me to pour myself out like a living waterfall. She dares me to enter the soul that is more than my own; she extinguishes fear in mere seconds. She lets light come through.

A feminist is any woman who tells the truth about her life

One cannot think well, love well, sleep well, if one has not dined well.

A self that goes on changing is a self that goes on living.

I have a deeply hidden and inarticulate desire for something beyond the daily life.

I see you everywhere, in the stars, in the river, to me you're everything that exists; the reality of everything.

The only advice ... that one person can give another about reading is to take no advice, to follow your own instincts, to use your own reason, to come to your own conclusions.

No need to hurry. No need to sparkle. No need to be anybody but oneself.

Women have served all these centuries as looking glasses possessing the power of reflecting the figure of man at twice its natural size.

Lock up your libraries if you like; but there is no gate, no lock, no bolt that you can set upon the freedom of my mind.

When working, my diet degrades to pizza three times a day, because I don't want to distract myself from anything.

If there is one notion I hate more than another, it is that of marriage - I mean marriage in the vulgar, weak sense, as a mere matter of sentiment.

Born to be wild - live to outgrow it.

If you die without agency as a child, but you have agency in your body [in the novel], how is it to be enacted unless it is being reimagined by a writer?

I was discouraged when I read that [Senate Minority Leader Mitch] McConnell said that Trans-Pacific Partnership was dead, but then I was told he turned around and said, "No, it's not."

Our desire to bring every good thing to our children is a force for good throughout the world. It’s what propels societies forward.

The roles we play in each other's lives are only as powerful as the trust and connection between us--the protection, safety, and caring we are willing to share.

Your life is a work of art, a craft to be carefully mastered. For patience has replaced time, and you are your own destination.

[I watch] Fincher, Spielberg, Cameron, McTiernan. Just people who are good at staging action. I like to know where I am. I don't like the kind of cutting where you don't know where you are.

That miracles have been, I do believe; that they may yet be wrought by the living, I do not deny: but have no confidence in those which are fathered on the dead.