All his flowers have been awaiting me on my arrival. I don't know whether to feel flattered or hunted.

I have gone to [this bookshop] for years, always finding the one book I wanted - and then three more I hadn’t known I wanted.

I don't want to be married just to be married. I can't think of anything lonelier than spending the rest of my life with someone I can't talk to, or worse, someone I can't be silent with.

Men are more interesting in books than they are in real life.

Perhaps there is some secret sort of homing instinct in books that brings them to their perfect readers. How delightful if that were true.

Reading good books ruins you for enjoying bad books.

Think of it! We could have gone on longing for one another and pretending not to notice forever. This obsession with dignity can ruin your life if you let it.

Then I imagined a lifetime of having to cry to get him to be kind, and I went back to no again.

Do you arrange your books alphabetically? (I hope not.)

‎What a blight that woman is. Do you happen to know why? I lean toward a malignant fairy at her christening.

I did not throw 'The Shepherd Boy Sings in the Valley of Humiliation' at the audience. I threw it at the elocution mistress. I meant to cast it at her feet, but I missed.

If size really mattered, a match wouldn’t be able to set a forest on fire.

Don't let your dreams rust! Listen to your youthful bells ringing loud inside of you.

Regress towards progress - Dr Wannamaker

Raising children is an incredibly hard and risky business in which no cumulative wisdom is gained: each generation repeats the mistakes the previous one made.

I understood that 'The Yellow Birds' would be a peculiar representation of the experience of being at war. I intended it to be so.

Our Age of Anxiety is, in great part, the result of trying to do today's job with yesterday's tools and yesterday's concepts.

I'm an American first, and I think that's how most people are.

You and I and everyone else have the attention span of gnats. And that means that saying or doing anything once simply doesn't work.

The wonder to me is not that she made it through at all but that she made it through so relatively intact, so vibrant. So free of bitterness and so empty of resentment.

The word education must not be understood in the sense of teaching but of assisting the psychological development of the child.