It gives me immense pleasure to be trustworthy, faithful, and true - to have the kind of romantic bond that inspires this.

Friendship is a strange animal. It only thrives in voluntary enjoyment of each other's company, in the pleasure of nonobligatory connection. I repeat: You owe me nothing.

Thank God for my hobgoblin, small-minded consistency.

I've always subscribed to the notion that a writer always has something else to say, and the more you write, the more you have to write about, because the act of writing is self-generating.

Sometimes I think of blogging as finger exercises for a violinist; sometimes I think of it as mulching a garden. It is incredibly useful and helpful to my "real" writing.

Another benefit is that the more I blog, the more I maintain and develop a first-person voice, which translates into a much greater ease with writing personal essays.

Although the point of blogging is that it doesn't pay, I often steal from my blog for paid publication. I've based several magazine essays on blog posts, as well as an entire book.

Turning the blog into a book was extremely difficult, a tremendous amount of sustained, hard work. Blogging is easy; writing a book is difficult.

Let nothing human be foreign to me

Everything that has ever happened to me is still all with me.

It happened every single day in Brooklyn: awaken to fresh glory, fall asleep to blight and ruin.

The belief in their actions can mend constellations. The ambition in their thirst for knowledge can both create and destroy.

Happiness doesn't come from commercial success but from the quality of work that you give back to your immediate community.

Relationship is a pervading and changing mystery... brutal or lovely, the mystery waits for people wherever they go, whatever extreme they run to.

You have to make a space in your heart, in your mind and in your life itself for authentic human connection.

I was Google's first woman engineer.

I assume everything I'm saying in an email or saying on the telephone is being looked at.

True success does not always come in forms that are visible or measurable.

It came time to go to college. My dad said, go wherever you want. Take whatever you want. He just really believed in getting out and being exposed to different things.

She was of the stuff of which great men's mothers are made. She was indispensable to high generation, hated at tea parties, feared in shops, and loved at crises.

Heaven is laying in my sweet baby's arms, hell is when my baby's not here.