We all - in the end - die in medias res. In the middle of a story. Of many stories.

Fashion is what seems beautiful now but looks ugly later; art can be ugly at first but it becomes beautiful later.

Even as a feminist, my whole life I'd been waiting for a man to love, who could love me. For decades, I'd thought that man would be my father. When I was 25, I met that man and he was my brother.

Everybody in America grew up without a father even if they had one. It was the fifties. They were working.

Often, I think, displaced people imagine themselves leading double lives. So a portion of my identity has always been privately siphoned into what would have been if I had stayed in Wisconsin.

Once upon a time, my mother lived in the posh downtown of Homs, Syria. She described my grandfather as a king in a storybook, atop a horse, wearing a didashah and pointing a long arm.

Reading-not occasionally, not only on vacation but everyday-gives me nourishment and enlarges my life in mysterious and essential ways.

So many things that seemed crucial and excruciatingly hard ended and then didn't matter anymore, forever after

We come into the world whole, all of us, but we don't know that, don't know that life will be taking large chunks out of us, forever.

The first person besides my mother who believed in me was a man whose last name I never knew. He was my boss, the manager of Swenson's Ice Cream shop.

Casebook is my attempt at a love story. I had a vision of a difficult love.

The heights by men reached and kept Were not attained by sudden flight But they while their companions slept Were toiling upward in the night.

You don't hurt 'em if you don't hit 'em.

Everybody has their own approach. I don't adhere to any one philosophy. I learn a lot from life and people - watching and other people watching.

The hard must become habit. The habit must become easy. The easy must become beautiful.

What is the goal? A house that is like the life that goes with it, a house that gives us beauty as we understand it- and beauty of a nobler kind that we may grow to understand.

In my wildest dreams, I never would have thought wed come to the point where were talking about the re-election of a black president.

[My work as a photographer is a] mission to document endangered species and landscapes in order to show a world worth saving.

Forgiving presupposes remembering.

Don't drink at all, don't smoke, you must exercise and eat vegetables and fruit.

Not many people have had as much bad luck as I have, but not many people have had as much good luck, either.