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

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.

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.

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

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

I am deeply in love with my life. With profound gratitude, I love and enjoy everything around me.

The magic of a tree is metaphorical. It celebrates its place. I brings comfort and beauty. Trees celebrate life.

What is essential in the life of a man of my kind is what he thinks and how he thinks, and not what he does or suffers.

It seems the more I try to connect with the world, I am feeling more alone than I ever have felt before

A just cause is not ruined by a few mistakes.

There is no such thing as luck, merely opportunity meeting preparedness. George S. Patton Jr.

I believe the test of government is the contentment of the people.

Premiering a new opera is probably one of the hardest things in the world to do, and opening nights of any opera are always pretty stressful.

Curiosity, like all other desires, produces pain as well as pleasure.

I say to the Taliban: surrender the terrorists; or surrender power. It's your choice.