With The Nightingale, I had been kicking the idea around for years. I was frightened to write it because on the surface it seems so different for me.

People forget that old women were young once, but d'you think we old women forget? In my heart, I'm still thirty.

Calling it lunacy makes it easier to explain away the things we don't understand.

Sight is one of the most easily deceived senses. I could make a coin disappear and your eyes would believe it gone, even if it were merely up my sleeve.

You learned to run from what you feel, and that's why you have nightmares. To deny is to invite madness. To accept is to control.

The answers are what they are. Just because you don't like them doesn't mean they aren't true.

The only truth was whatever you could make someone believe.

Trying to justify a world we don't hold all the answers to is what bedevils the best of us. Sometimes it's better just to accept that things are as we see them.

Impatient men are generous ones. Or haven't you learned that by now?

All life's a risk, that's what makes it interesting.

Logic only tells us what's there; it can't really address what isn't. Even the most devoted empiricist must admit that we have no hope of understanding the universe. Some things are unknowable.

Whatever cosmic attraction had drawn [Jess & Addie] to one another in the first place was beginning to fill in with the chinks and mortar of very real, very likeable human traits.

I pray hard work hard and leave the rest to God.

The Democratic Party was always there on crime, but in the past we let the ideologues on the left dominate. The Republicans may still let the ideologues on the right dominate.

I just feel such freedom to do whatever. If a song's seven minutes or ten minutes long, then so be it - it's that long.

If there's one thing I really love... it's sad music.

The unthankful heart... discovers no mercies; but let the thankful heart sweep through the day and, as the magnet finds the iron, so it will find, in every hour, some heavenly blessings!

My parents were determined to move into the middle class.

Do not, as you value the health and happiness of those who sit at your table, place before them hot leavened bread or biscuit.

Far less envy in America than in France.

The experience of celebrity is gradually being democratized.