I'll take any life in which I can make choices and have agency, and America is not a bad place for all that.

When I look at my old pictures, all I can see is what I used to be but am no longer. I think: What I can see is what I am not.

Home is where somebody notices when you are no longer there.

The perfect borscht is what life should be but never is.

Belief and delusion are incestuous siblings.

I am itching to criticize some well-regarded writers' works, but I am not doing it because I am perfectly aware that my critique could easily be reduced to envy or just plain meanness.

I gradually became aware that my interiority was inseparable from my exteriority, that the geography of my city was the geography of my soul.

I much preferred winning to thinking and I didn't like losing at all.

You don't want your neurosurgeon to have doubts about the meaning of it all while he or she is operating on your brain.

If you can't go home, there is nowhere to go, and nowhere is the biggest place in the world-indeed, nowhere is the world.

We knew - but didn't want to know - what was going to happen, the sky descending upon our heads like the shadow of a falling piano in a cartoon.

Every journey is personal. Every journey is spiritual. You can't compare them, can't replace, can't repeat. You can bring back the memories but they only bring tears to your eyes.

That's when I realized the chill wasn't coming from outside—it was coming from within me.

May my mind be clear and my heart pure.

We as women, we have to understand that we know more, just even instinctively, than we think we do.

You won't get cooperation out of a hierarchical system. You get enforced directions from the top, and nothing I know of can run like that.

Our policemen and women are disrespected. We need law and order, but we need justice, too.

How did mankind ever come by the idea of liberty? What a grand thought it was!

One has neither independence nor freedom from bondage when he is obligated to others

The only life that is happy is the life that can renounce the amenities of the world. To it the amenities of the world are so many graces of fate.

I play bass. I don't have to go out there and screech.