I just want fiction to remain a vital force for entertainment and not just for contemplation. Both things can exist.

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.

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.

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.

I’m alive, ” he groaned. “But I’m not doing a very good job of it.

The public is blaming the city officials, who in turn have to find someone else to blame. It's the nature of the beast. If the police, the politicians, can pass the buck on down the line, they will.

Feeling hurt and not being able to recover is a consequence of 'Love until it hurts'.

But...he's a demon. Isn't that sort of the main category of Things to Smite?

None are more unjust in their judgments of others than those who have a high opinion of themselves.

If all those around you believe some particular thing, you will soon be tempted to share in that belief.

I do not think that any sorrow of youth or manhood equalled in intensity or duration the black and hopeless misery which followed the wrench of transference from a happy home to a school.

You know everyone loves to be the villain.

The entire social order ... is arrayed against a woman who wants to rise to a man's reputation.

If you're opposites, you complement each other; you aren't jealous. Just annoyance and fighting, as opposed to rivalry.