Class, she reminded herself, was the real marker in America.

Was there anything quite so painful, so fraught with the possibilities of hurt, as gift giving within a family?

Soon would come the night in which there was no more work – not the work of the hands, nor the work of the mind, nor the work of the heart.

Still, for all that, her life had lacked passion. The demons had never come for her.

Education teaches children to lose interest in what matters most to them.

Just because you pretend the universe doesn't have teeth doesn't mean you won't get eaten in the end.

The body was an organic machine, period, and God was a figment of its fitful imagination.

But men are such strange creatures, really. I think most of them would rather we weren’t around at all, so they could just spend time mooning over each other. Hero worship and all that stuff.

The past is the past. It’s the present we should worry about.

It was a failure of pedagogical nerve, she reminded herself, to give up on a student.

All desire, Tracy had had occasion since to think, is to some degree monstrous.

Humility is an essential quality in writers who want to write well.

I would’ve loved to return to me home of Ireland, but Joshua never made the bloody pikes he was flogged for.

A human being in perfection ought always to preserve a calm and peaceful mind and never to allow passion or a transitory desire to disturb his tranquility.

We didn't starve but nobody ate chicken unless we were sick or the chicken was.

My kids are around pit bulls every day. In the ’70s they blamed Dobermans, in the ’80s they blamed German Shepherds, in the ’90s they blamed the Rottweiler. Now they blame the Pit Bull.

Let your heart become so saturated with love that you are able to ride the waves of change with equipoise, and find new meaning in everything that happens.

Untouchability, I hold, is a sin, if Bhagavadgita is one of our Divine Books.

I'm a bit of a tease. I'd make out with a lot of people but not go beyond that.

I own I never really warmed To the reformer or reformed. And yet conversion has its place Not halfway down the scale of grace.

To worship our false selves is to worship nothing. And the worship of nothing is hell.