To tell someone not to be emotional is to tell them to be dead.

Why is the measure of love loss?

Yes, the stories are dangerous, she was right. A book is a magic carpet that flies you off elsewhere. A book is a door. You open it. You step through. Do you come back?

...there are two kinds of writing: the one you write and the one that writes you.

Part fact part fiction is what life is. And it is always a cover story. I wrote my way out.

Six books… my mother didn’t want books falling into my hands. It never occurred to her that I fell into the books – that I put myself inside them for safe keeping.

Sometimes you have to live in precarious and temporary places. Unsuitable places. Wrong places. Sometimes the safe place won't help you.

Where you are born--what you are born into, the place, the history of the place, how that history mates with your own-- stamps who you are, whatever the pundits of globalisation have to say.

Memory loss is one way of coping with damage.

We bury things so deep we no longer remember there was anything to bury. Our bodies remember. Our neurotic states remember. But we don't.

Unconditional love is what a child should expect from a parent even though it rarely works out that way.

Don’t react to any fuming argument.

A good trap is like a good story: hidden and leading towardone inevitable conclusion

Attention is the most important currency that anybody can give you. It’s worth more than money, possession, or things.

At the back of our brains is a blaze of astonishment at our own existence. The object of the artistic and spiritual life is to dig for this sunrise of wonder.

I should have written more. I should have written more during the period when I just liked so much doing the political work in the streets.

My life has been the poem I would have writ, But I could not both live and utter it.

I was never the 'babe,' so I knew I'd never get those big roles. I'd always be the best friend or the quirky sidekick.

The key to Operations at Wal-Mart is their ability to maintain the highest standards while at the same time getting things done with lockstep execution.

The flaw in our character is our insistence on separating blue-collar jobs from white-collar jobs, and encouraging one form of education over another.

When I finally bought one, the Buchla was my only piece of furniture. I lived with that thing. It was my boyfriend! I thought there was something wrong with me, because I was in love with a machine