It can only be that places left behind often become emotionally simplified - that they sound a single note of pain or pleasure, which means that they are never what they were.

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.

Your life has a natural motion. Surrendering reveals how flowing this life could be.

it's a lot easier to be lost than found.

Rest your eyes and then read till they fall out of your head.

One on God's side is a majority.

Men throw broken things away, but God never uses anything until he first breaks it.

I'm very awkward when I have time off. I don't know what to do with myself. It's weird not to work.

We're not going to put the cart before the horse and just think by sending more troops, we're automatically going to make Americans safe.

Music is powerful. It is the only thing that can speak into your mind, your heart and your soul without your permission.

The kind of life I want is to be a person who would get a personal note every day.

There are other ways of benefiting than by being a recognized tulku and sitting on a throne.