Fashion is what seems beautiful now but looks ugly later; art can be ugly at first but it becomes beautiful later.

We all - in the end - die in medias res. In the middle of a story. Of many stories.

Even as a feminist, my whole life I'd been waiting for a man to love, who could love me. For decades, I'd thought that man would be my father. When I was 25, I met that man and he was my brother.

Everybody in America grew up without a father even if they had one. It was the fifties. They were working.

Often, I think, displaced people imagine themselves leading double lives. So a portion of my identity has always been privately siphoned into what would have been if I had stayed in Wisconsin.

Once upon a time, my mother lived in the posh downtown of Homs, Syria. She described my grandfather as a king in a storybook, atop a horse, wearing a didashah and pointing a long arm.

Reading-not occasionally, not only on vacation but everyday-gives me nourishment and enlarges my life in mysterious and essential ways.

So many things that seemed crucial and excruciatingly hard ended and then didn't matter anymore, forever after

We come into the world whole, all of us, but we don't know that, don't know that life will be taking large chunks out of us, forever.

The first person besides my mother who believed in me was a man whose last name I never knew. He was my boss, the manager of Swenson's Ice Cream shop.

Casebook is my attempt at a love story. I had a vision of a difficult love.

People read books to escape the uncertainties of life.

History was safer than the news, because there was no question of how it would end. ~ "The Briefcase

You have to let the balloon go if you want to see it fly.

Divide and command, a wise maxim; Unite and guide, a better.

The manager could not even talk to us at the interval. He said we were bad.

I don't find inspiration by just sitting down with a guitar anymore. I lost that. I started being so interested in other kinds of music.

As I graduated high school, it didn't faze me anymore. Right now, I don't even care what people think of me. I'm happy with myself.

I can tell it all in song: pathos, gladness, love, joy, unhappiness.

Very early you come to the realization that nothing will ever take you away from yourself.

I can’t think. I can’t work or sleep. My body aches for you. I can make you want me again. Let me try.