My parents were kind enough to spend hours talking to me.

Reading is entering into the consciousness of another human being.

The love I felt for her on that train ride had a capital and provinces, parishes and a Vatican, an orange planet and many sullen moons -- it was systemic and it was complete.

If you stop thinking, if you stop wondering, you die.

The fading light is us, and we are, for a moment so brief (...) beautiful.

Good fiction makes me turn off all the other parts of my brain, so that I become quiet and submissive, entirely at the mercy of the work at hand.

She took my hand and pulled me after her, her shoulders giving off a sweet peppermint concoction that the bodies of young women sometimes produce to make my life more difficult.

If my mother hadn't tried to sell me chicken Kiev cutlets for $1.40 after I graduated from college, maybe I would've been the lawyer she wanted me to be.

You are not what you want. You are what wants you back.

Forget the fountain of youth, pal of mine. You can live to be a thousand, and it won't matter. Mediocrities like you deserve immortality.

If you read only one memoir by a disaffected, urban, 20-something Jewish girl this year, make it this one. Shukert rocks the lulav.

He doesn't jingle my chimes.

There’s nothing that makes an artist more beloved than the audience pitying him because his work comes at a price they would never pay.

I see my father. I see him gone away. My world is a little bit colder.

The quality of a person’s life is determined by how obedient he is to the Word of God.

Computer science is one of the worst things that ever happened to either computers or to science.

Freedom was taken away from my family until we landed in America and it was given back to us.

Music changes, but there's a timeless touch that we put to it, which I think is really important.

Everything big-budget or stereotypical I was offered after 'Slumdog Millionaire' was a huge no-no.

I've been offered big money to promote machines. And high-protein diets, when that was really popular. There was always some new powder or diet plan that somebody wanted to put my name on.

To release others from the expectations we have of them is to really love them.