no reason to mention my peculiarities, my wandering in the maze these many years, shut away from sight. and from love, too.

We knew, finally, that the girls were really women in disguise, that they understood love and even death, and that our job was merely to create the noise that seemed to fascinate them.

Biology gives you a brain. Life turns it into a mind.

When I wrote The Virgin Suicides, I gave myself very strict rules about the narrative voice: the boys would only be able to report what they had seen or found or what had been told to them.

Basically what we have here is a dreamer. Somebody out of touch with reality. When she jumped, she probably thought she'd fly

It was one of those humid days when the atmosphere gets confused. Sitting on the porch, you could feel it: the air wishing it was water.

In the end, the tortures tearing the Lisbon girls pointed to a simple reasoned refusal to accept the world as it was handed down to them, so full of flaws.

Depression is like a bruise that never goes away. A bruise in your mind. You just got to be careful not to touch it where it hurts. It's always there, though.

You never get over it, but you get to where it doesn't bother you so much.

It was like autumn, looking at her. it was like driving up north to see the colors.

She held herself very straight, like Audrey Hepburn, whom all women idolize and men never think about.

Most people avoid thinking if they can, some of us are addicted to thinking, but Von Neumann actually enjoyed thinking, maybe even to the exclusion of everything else.

We should not so much esteem our poverty as a misfortune, were it not that the world treats it so much as a crime

Here pity only lives when it is dead - Virgil

Meditation is simply getting to know your mind.

Just as entrepreneurs developed America, they can develop other countries, too.

Various Turkish people invaded southwest Asia during the Middle Ages and carved an empire for themselves from lands occupied by the indigenous Semitic and Indo-European inhabitants.

Innovation is the market introduction of a technical or organisational novelty, not just its invention.

Marriage must cease to be a matter of arrangement made by parents for money.

No tree in all the grove but has its charms, Though each its hue peculiar.

No cigar-smoker ever committed suicide.