[W]hat should I have done? Gather dirt in my purse?

...I've been told that this building is here waiting for me. It's been my Buckingham Palace, my White House, my Taj Mahal, so coming here today as a real member is - well, it's a big deal.

...while you've never heard of her, in my mind she's practically a celebrity.

I've always liked Anna, but according to my mother, her family is complete New Money, and my grandmother has pointed out on several occasions that they're not even really Southern.

There is life and there is death, but on the border, where one shades into the other, there is the In Between. "...[M]ost people go through life without even knowing that it's there.

I'm named after my great grand-mother...while you've never heard of her, in my mind she's practically a celebrity.

You won't be able to find it out for yourself in any library or archive, either, because my grandmother has carefully and systematically destroyed every shred of evidence.

If not for her truly sparkling personality, she would have been doomed.

[W]hat my grandmother and my mother and I all know is that our beauty is no miracle. It is bought and paid for.

[M]y grandmother...had always complained that our house didn't have a profile that was "significant enough.

...he went off to Paris. Actually, I don't know for sure that Paris is where he ended up.

I can write about all of these bizarre and funny characters in my book, "Diggin' Elroy, " because I know them better than anyone else. I have a little bit of all of them in me.

A lot of people see it as a kind of failure to stay in the place where you’re from, especially if you’re from the Midwest. Like ambition is geographic.

These are the divine days of divine miracles.

There is only one thing people like that is good for them a good night's sleep.

I want to be a vampire. They're the coolest monsters.

Wes Clark put forward a middle-class tax plan, but it only helps a quarter of middle-class families, none without minor children at home. And mine helps 98 percent of the middle class.

God takes men's hearty desires and will, instead of the deed, where they have not power to fulfill it; but he never took the bare deed instead of the will.

Conspiracy theory is the ultimate refuge of the powerless. If you cannot change your own life, it must be that some greater force controls the world.

In the orchard and rose garden I long to see your face. In the taste of Sweetness I long to kiss your lips. In the shadows of passion I long for your love.

My first big heartbreak proved to me that what doesn't kill you makes you stronger.