A finished person is a boring person.

The thing that is really hard, and really amazing, is giving up on being perfect and beginning the work of becoming yourself.

I would be the most content if my children grew up to be the kind of people who think decorating consists mostly of building enough bookshelves.

There is a little boy inside the man who is my brother... Oh, how I hated that little boy. And how I love him too.

After all those years as a woman hearing 'not thin enough, not pretty enough, not smart enough, not this enough, not that enough,' almost overnight I woke up one morning and thought, 'I'm enough.'

Books are the plane, and the train, and the road. They are the destination, and the journey. They are home.

There is a lot of talk now about metal detectors and gun control. Both are good things. But they are no more a solution than forks and spoons are a solution to world hunger.

Look back, to slavery, to suffrage, to integration and one thing is clear. Fashions in bigotry come and go. The right thing lasts.

You are the only person alive who has sole custody of your life ... Your entire life ... Not just the life of your mind, but the life of your heart. Not just your bank account, but your soul.

America is a country that seems forever to be toddler or teenager, at those two stages of human development characterized by conflict between autonomy and security.

In books I have traveled, not only to other worlds, but into my own.

A priceless moment is when the person that you have fallen in love with, looks you right in the eyes to tells you that they have fallen in love with you.

People think of the military as being about guns and fighting wars, but it's really about service to country and community.

I still do intense interval training. I like miles and quarters best. In races I can set my mind, and I believe I could break 2:20 again.

I was very sensitive. I liked everything that touched fantasy and beauty. I dreamed of being a ballerina, but Mother said I was too big, too long.

One of the things reading does, it makes your loneliness manageable if you are an essentially lonely person.

New doctrines ever displease the old. They like to fancy that the world has been losing wisdom, instead of gaining it, since they were young.

I will say the most raw joy I've experienced reading has probably come from the times I've been reading with my little boys.

My parents were really strict about me not watching cartoons.

Being a man of taste and sophistication, the 80s were objectively, quantifiably, empirically, diagram-it-on-a-blackboard the worst decade in the history of recorded music.

A very scurvy fellow.