All human beings were of course unique, and they only discovered that when someone else fell in love with them or when no one ever fell in love with them.

All cows were like other cows, all tigers like all other tigers - What on earth happened to human beings?

That question is too good to spoil with an answer.

If you find life absurd, shouldn’t you find death precisely meaningful?

Using someone's name during a conversation was like a casual caress, like stroking their hair.

But nothing exists in the future; it is empty; one might die at any minute.

A man who has never been hungry may possess a more refined palate, but he has no idea what it means to eat.

I'm afraid love is just a word.

Perhaps, he thought, true pure love, like all flowers, flourished best with its roots in muck and mud. Perhaps that was a law of life that held everything together.

The phrase "working mother" is redundant.

The answer to human life is not to be found within the limits of human life.

... as beauty is in the eye of the beholder, the ideal library is in the wish of its maker.

In high school, I taught dance classes for 3-year-olds up to 16-year-olds, so between that and some bat mitzvah money, I saved up a pretty good nest egg to move to L.A.

Each of us must turn inward and destroy in himself all that he thinks he ought to destroy in others.

For me, I was the most vulnerable and needed the most in my postpartum experience and got the least. It was just kind of a drop-off. That would be my focus - on the woman, afterwards.

I think I'm still, in many ways, a terribly self-conscious person. I'd probably be shooting and think, "Well, how does my hair look?"

You cannot afford to rely on history, you have to make it.

Many people, not just Asians, are more concerned with hustling and getting to meetings with contacts to gain success.