an autobiography held out the promise of hearing truths that only friends confess to one another but are knowledge you need to live.

There is no neutrality. There is only greater or lesser awareness of one's bias.

The literature of women's lives is a tradition of escapees, women who have lived to tell the tale.

Perhaps that is what love is -- the momentary or prolonged refusal to think of another person in terms of power.

I believe we need literature, which, by allowing us to experience more fully, to imagine more fully, enables us to live more freely.

biographies are a little like marriages: You only have room in your life for one or two.

One form of loneliness is to have a memory and no one to share it with.

the challenge of nonfiction is to marry art and truth.

The writer… begins in confusion and nothingness and writes his way into clarity.

Every reading is a misreading.

It bothered me that we behaved differently when other people were at the arcade. It bothered me that we had to be different at different times. I wished we could always be ourselves.

A business owner who is not willing to invest in their business is a business owner who shouldn't be in business.

There is absolutely nothing that can harm the shadow. Nothing. I advise you strongly not try.

It's as if all identity has been stolen from them, except their identity as slaves.

It is now your duty to hone that talent, because a person who wastes his God-given talents is a donkey.

Memory works according to meaning, and when something is important to you, the Google in your brain brings it forward all of a sudden.

Each had his own business to think of. Each had his past shut in him like the leaves of a book known to him by heart; and his friends could only read the title.

Fairest of all that earth beholds, the hues That live among the clouds, and flush the air, Lingering, and deepening at the hour of dews.