Good fiction makes me turn off all the other parts of my brain, so that I become quiet and submissive, entirely at the mercy of the work at hand.

Reading is entering into the consciousness of another human being.

The love I felt for her on that train ride had a capital and provinces, parishes and a Vatican, an orange planet and many sullen moons -- it was systemic and it was complete.

If you stop thinking, if you stop wondering, you die.

The fading light is us, and we are, for a moment so brief (...) beautiful.

She took my hand and pulled me after her, her shoulders giving off a sweet peppermint concoction that the bodies of young women sometimes produce to make my life more difficult.

If my mother hadn't tried to sell me chicken Kiev cutlets for $1.40 after I graduated from college, maybe I would've been the lawyer she wanted me to be.

You are not what you want. You are what wants you back.

Forget the fountain of youth, pal of mine. You can live to be a thousand, and it won't matter. Mediocrities like you deserve immortality.

If you read only one memoir by a disaffected, urban, 20-something Jewish girl this year, make it this one. Shukert rocks the lulav.

Michigan, with its delicious American name. How lucky one must be to live there.

I suppose we all tend to want the impossible. And sometimes in attempting it we achieve something near enough to the impossible to elicit satisfaction.

Everybody said Peyton Place would be a mistake.

Mental differences between the lowest men and the animals are less than those between the lowest and the highest man.

If we do not honor our past, we lose our future. If we destroy our roots, we cannot grow.

The tune was too ingrained for Mortenson to consider the novelty of this moment- an American, lost in Pakistan, singing a German hymn in Swahili.

Even though our society is increasingly pluralistic, we must ensure an equal playing field rather than a religiously cleansed arena where people of faith are no longer welcome.

The problem with the American health-care system that it is not working for the American family.

The love and laughter are what you need most in your life. They'll fill out all the potholes in the road.

You always get that energy, you just want to be heard, to go out, do your thing and show people that we have just as much talent here as everywhere else.

Express your most powerful thought in the shortest sentence.