There is a small window of opportunity for freckled girls to tan.

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.

I close my eyes, thinking that there is nothing like an embrace after an absence, nothing like fitting my face into the curve of his shoulder and filling my lungs with the scent of him.

She was the kind of shopkeeper who finishes the paragraph she is reading before waiting on the customer.

To have the translator be a figure in the book's presentation seems like a big thing, especially for a book that's really popular.

It's kinda hard bein humble in the belly of the struggle, Doin things that probably get you in trouble.

Poetry is when words are robbed of their attributed truth.

One of the many divine qualities of the Bible is that it does not yield its secrets to the irreverent and the censorious.

A man's manners are a mirror in which he shows his portrait.

Back in the day when I played, a pitcher had 3 pitches: a fastball, a curveball, a slider, a changeup and a good sinker pitch.

I was always fiercely determined and driven to succeed.

When you say you don't get religion, you're just saying that you don't get organized religion.