Since it's fiction, the book resonates, at least for me, on various levels, some of which intimate ideas about history but none of which have the kind of directly causal reasoning you cite.

Every person has a range. In fiction, you get to be it all. I’m as much the men in my book as I am the women. I write how I write and there is no mission to stake a claim.

To be alive is to listen quietly while other people talk. That's how you learn something.

I was doing that thing the infatuated do, stitching destiny onto the person we want stitched to us.

I’d been listening to men talk since I arrived in New York City. That’s what men like to do. Talk. Profess like experts. When one finally came along who didn’t say much, I listened.

Danzon is my favorite Cuban music, played by a traditional string orchestra with flute and piano. It's very formally structured but romantic music, which derives from the French-Haitian contradance.

People who want their love easy don't really want love.

For me, truth cracks open in the places where things do not cohere. That's how life is.

It's amazing how life conspires to set you up with what you need.

A funny thing about women and machines: the combination made men curious.

I don't regard the real and true and authentic as something to claim as a moral high ground.

Don't you agree that if I act like there is nothing going on, other people will behave that way too?

Wisdom is knowing what to do next. Virtue is doing it.

I felt for the first time, maybe ever, how much harder it was to be the adults. And I wasn't sure I could do that when it was my turn.

I am still far from being what I want to be, but with God's help I shall succeed.

Only in the stillness of detachment can the soul yield up her secrets.

If you have Palestinians who have no hope, who don't have a job, who've used up all their resources, the notion of getting rid of violence is a dream.

I'm more selective now I've got a family. I don't want to work all the time. My daughter's 12; I don't want to miss out on her life. Soon she'll be a teenager; she won't want me around.

If you accept a limiting belief, then it will become a truth for you.

If the culture shifts, if people think differently about women, the art will shift, too. You can't ask art to make social change. It's not what it's for.

There is nothing more universally commended than a fine day; the reason is that people can commend it without envy.