What are you doing here, honey? You're not even old enough to know how bad life gets." (...) "Obviously, Doctor," she said, "you've never been a thirteen-year-old girl.

We knew, finally, that the girls were really women in disguise, that they understood love and even death, and that our job was merely to create the noise that seemed to fascinate them.

Biology gives you a brain. Life turns it into a mind.

When I wrote The Virgin Suicides, I gave myself very strict rules about the narrative voice: the boys would only be able to report what they had seen or found or what had been told to them.

Basically what we have here is a dreamer. Somebody out of touch with reality. When she jumped, she probably thought she'd fly

It was one of those humid days when the atmosphere gets confused. Sitting on the porch, you could feel it: the air wishing it was water.

In the end, the tortures tearing the Lisbon girls pointed to a simple reasoned refusal to accept the world as it was handed down to them, so full of flaws.

Depression is like a bruise that never goes away. A bruise in your mind. You just got to be careful not to touch it where it hurts. It's always there, though.

You never get over it, but you get to where it doesn't bother you so much.

It was like autumn, looking at her. it was like driving up north to see the colors.

She held herself very straight, like Audrey Hepburn, whom all women idolize and men never think about.

Cheating is pure hypocrisy. Our partner deserves better than that. If we don’t love someone, we should not be with them. That would also be hypocrisy.

But shame is like a wound that is never exposed and therefore never heals.

Indifference to me, is the epitome of all evil.

Passion colors all that it touches in its own hues.

A private victory leads to a public victory and a corporate blessing, because God turns His face toward those who will demonstrate character when no one is looking.

An ounce of image is worth a pound of performance

People don't have these tidy little redemption arcs in reality the way they do in movies.

Where you stand today does not matter; it is the direction in which your are moving, and the rate at which you travel, that count.

And this Nation, for all its hopes and all its boasts, will not be fully free until all its citizens are free.

Faults of ignorance are excusable only where the ignorance itself is so