If not violently overthrown, expectation can have a power in itself, can invest a place with what literally isn't there.

I was happy without having sought happiness.

Every reader writes the book he or she reads, supplying what isn't there, and that creative invention becomes the book.

Are not dreams as much a part of living as waking life is?

fiction is necessary to life - not only as books but as dreams, dreams that frame the world and give it meaning.

The advice is a call to empathy, the ultimate act of the imagination, and the true ground of all fiction.

The very idea of a library for me is bound to my mother and father and includes the history of my own metamorphosis through books, fictions that are no less part of me than much of my own history.

Feminism was good for me, as were any number of causes, but as I developed as a thinking person, the truisms and dogmas of every ideology became as worn as that book's cover.

Immigration inevitably involves error and revision. What I imagined it would be, it's not. For better or worse, some mistake is unavoidable.

No doubt I would have felt reverent in less lovely places, because I imagined a past I connected to myself.

What she remembered is undoubtedly something so radically different from the image I gave to her memory that the two may be incompatible.

i had a dream when i was 22 that someday i would go to the region of ice and snow and go on and on till i came to one of the poles of the earth

Once an angel said to the dreamer, "You will get whatever you want in your life in this world and from this world".

But I was beginning to intuit that full-blown maturity was not so very different from childhood. Both states in their extreme were all about following the rules.

It's kind of a terrible irony, in a way, that the solution to America's problems was World War II.

Every time I write something, I think, this is the most offensive thing I will ever write. But no. I always surprise myself.

He who flatters a man is his enemy. he who tells him of his faults is his maker.

I love to tell stories. It's a delight for me.

I have all the emotions that everyone has; it just appears that I don't.

A woman seldom comes out of a sullen spell until she's sure her husband has suffered as much as she thinks he should.