There were many things they simply didn't talk about: between them, silence was not so much a form of evasion as a way for solitary people to exist in a family.

She struggled with her sadness, but tried to conceal it, to divide it into smaller and smaller parts and scatter these in places she thought no one would find them.

I've reached the age where bruises are formed from failures within rather than accidents without.

...after all, who isn't a survivor from the wreck of childhood?

When at last I came upon the right book, the feeling was violent: it blew open a hole in me that made life more dangerous because I couldn't control what came through it.

The price we paid for the volumes of ourselves that we suffocated in the dark.

In life we sit at the table and refuse to eat, and in death we are eternally hungry.

I read differently now, more painstakingly, knowing I am probably revisiting the books I love for the last time. (245)

Love could be a last hope and a star to steer by.

Every new book we read in our brief and busy lives means that a classic is left unread.

Nobody knows much about women, not even Freud, not even women themselves. But it's like electricity: you don't need to know how it works to get a shock on the fingers.

Do not desperately seek refuge in heaven and delve in blissful ignorance

Good people need room to develop. They have to find their own voice . . . each IBMer is a businessperson working within the framework of the company structure.

It's funny how most activists are pacifists.

People are afraid of an unorganized, wasteful government.

The American people may not be the best-educated, but they're very wise at heart.

I didn't go to film school. I just kept doing videos and whatever. So I guess I learned my education from just experience. Figuring out what worked and what didn't work.

I lived too much in my head instead of the real world.