Women now were told not to settle for second best, told that they deserved better, but at a time, it seemed, when there was so much less to go around.

Your numbness is something perhaps you cannot help. It is what the world has done to you. But your coldness. That is what you do to the world.

This is what happened in love. One of you cried a lot and then both of you grew sarcastic.

For love to last, you had to have illusions or have no illusions at all. But you had to stick to one or the other. It was the switching back and forth that endangered things.

Usually she ordered a cup of coffee and a cup of tea, as well as a brownie, propping up her sadness with chocolate and caffeine so that it became an anxiety.

A short story is a love affair, a novel is a marriage. A short story is a photograph; a novel is a film.

One had to build shelters. One had to make pockets and live inside them.

They had, finally, the only thing anyone really wants in life: someone to hold your hand when you die.

The only really good piece of advice I have for my students is, 'Write something you'd never show your mother or father. And you know what they say? I could never do that!'

She was unequal to anyone's wistfulness. She had made too little of her life. Its loneliness shamed her like a crime.

If one publishes, then one is creating a public record of Learning to Write.

Vampire Diaries instead of Supernatural?(Bad choice.)

Indian intellectuals today feel radical when they condemn fundamentalism, but not many people are talking about the links between privatization, globalization, and fundamentalism.

Nobody is starving on the streets. We've always taken care of them. We take care of our own; we always have. It is not the government's responsibility.

I became stereotyped.

The white spruce forest along the banks is most inspiring, magnificent here. Down the terraced slopes and right to the water's edge on the alluvial soil it stands in ranks.

The true cure for self-righteousness is self-knowledge.

The desire to be singular and to astonish by ways out of the common seems to me to be the source of many virtues.

God is the one that's ultimately in control of everything. You can't try to change things when they're not meant to be changed.

Apples taste sweetest when they're going.

The quest for homeland security is heading ... toward the quasi-militarization of everyday life ... If danger might lurk anywhere, maybe everything must be protected and policed.