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?

Why is the measure of love loss?

...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.

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

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.

He wanted to regain his memory, but not if it cost him Victoria. He would give up everything for her.

To the factory farmer, in contrast to the traditional farmer with his sense of honor and obligation, the animals are 'production units, ' and accorded all the sympathy that term suggests.

Zeus, the father of the Olympic Gods, turned mid-day into night, hiding the light of the dazzling Sun; and sore fear came upon men.

We will not be dictated to by men with less intelligence, energy, initiative and ambition than we ourselves possess.

The bearing of a child takes nine months, no matter how many women are assigned.

All the dogs I have are German shepherds from Germany, and I fly them back to Germany to show them.

Thinking is a sacred disease and sight is deceptive.

Friendship, Roland realized, was its very own kind of love.

In Buddhism, compassion always goes with wisdom. Compassion without wisdom is not understood to be true compassion, and wisdom without compassion is not true wisdom.

To learn to die is an heroic work.