Leave the dishes unwashed and the demands on your time unanswered. Be ruthless and refuse to do what people ask of you.

Like the bodies of dancers or athletes, the minds of readers are genuinely happy and self-possessed only when cavorting around, doing their stretches and leaps and jumps to the tune of words.

I have done what people do, my life makes a reasonable showing. Can I go back to my books now?

what I love is slowness. Slow people, slow reading, slow traveling, slow eggs, and slow love. Everything good comes slow.

In books I found explicitly, flamboyantly, everything censored in life.

Getting away from being 'a good girl' is important because it's impossible to be a 'good girl' and a writer at the same time.

Reading. Reading was the stable backdrop against which my life was played.

How are we to spend our lives, anyway? That is the real question. We read to seek the answer, and the search itself--the task of a lifetime--becomes the answer.

Nothing is as horrendous as imagining the times of happiness from an environment which is that of hell.

Parables, yes. We here are to lead life with woe. Tasting bitter.the Tai Chi instructor

Linc had always been a leg man. Thankfully hers made up for her caustic tongue and armour plated panties

Prayers have no boundaries. They can leap miles and continents and be translated instantly into any language.

It's hard to be happy, and safe, and applauded in a miserable world.

One knows less about one's own destiny than about anything else on earth.

Post-9/11, we saw an immediate uptick in the amount of people in our stores, all over the country. People wanted that human connection. We are not going to fracture the Starbucks experience.

I will always be haunted by thoughts of a sun-drenched elsewhere.

The true martial artist yields to the weak, while withstanding the strong.

... there is no such thing as a rational world and a separate irrational world, but only one world containing both.

There is much more to life than what gets measured in accounts. Even economists know that.

As soon as Oliver Twist is serialized, people who would never dream of reading [Charles] Dickens, if they hadn't seen him on their box, buy the paperback.