If you grew up in a house where you weren't loved, you didn't know there was an alternative.

We knew, finally, that the girls were really women in disguise, that they understood love and even death, and that our job was merely to create the noise that seemed to fascinate them.

Biology gives you a brain. Life turns it into a mind.

When I wrote The Virgin Suicides, I gave myself very strict rules about the narrative voice: the boys would only be able to report what they had seen or found or what had been told to them.

Basically what we have here is a dreamer. Somebody out of touch with reality. When she jumped, she probably thought she'd fly

It was one of those humid days when the atmosphere gets confused. Sitting on the porch, you could feel it: the air wishing it was water.

In the end, the tortures tearing the Lisbon girls pointed to a simple reasoned refusal to accept the world as it was handed down to them, so full of flaws.

Depression is like a bruise that never goes away. A bruise in your mind. You just got to be careful not to touch it where it hurts. It's always there, though.

You never get over it, but you get to where it doesn't bother you so much.

It was like autumn, looking at her. it was like driving up north to see the colors.

She held herself very straight, like Audrey Hepburn, whom all women idolize and men never think about.

We shall not cease from exploration, and the end of all our exploring will be to arrive where we started and know the place for the first time.

Nothing in life possesses value except the degree of power--assuming that life itself is the will to power.

If there are gods, why is the world so full of pain and injustice?' 'Because of men like you.

Management is all about managing in the short term, while developing the plans for the long term.

The advice nearest to my heart and deepest in my convictions is that the Union of the States be cherished and perpetuated.

There is no great writing, only great rewriting.

Too much thinking is a bad thing sometimes.

Remember, meditation cannot be result-oriented; you simply meditate, that's all.

No man will be found in whose mind airy notions do not sometimes tyrannize, and force him to hope or fear beyond the limits of sober probability.

Are we savages or what?