When you were a little girl, Madam.....was this the woman you dreamed of becoming?

How remarkable we are in our ability to hide things from ourselves - our conscious minds only a small portion of our actual minds, jellyfish floating on a vast dark sea of knowing and deciding.

We are each the love of someone's life.

Surely words are just the background music when passion pounces on a soul.

Does love always form, like a pearl, around the hardened bits of life?

So tell me gentleman, tell me the time and place where it was easy to be a woman.

It may be a childish torment, but we do not get to choose our demons.

The possibilities. Is there any greater pain to know what could be, and yet be powerless to make it be?

When I meet a woman whose energy falters at the first barrier,she seems to fade beside my mother.

It is a brave and stupid thing, a beautiful thing, to waste one's life for love.

I love going to writers' colonies in pastoral settings where there's nothing to do, but either walk around or read a book or work on your book.

An eagle can mock a lion only because of its wings.

I don't recall having any self-awareness about the intricacy of my stories.

I had a moment of clarity, saw the feeling in the heart of things, walked out to the garden crying.

Whence arises all that order and beauty we see in the world?

Sometimes you can't be what you ought to be, you can't have what you ought to have.

No matter what we've done, no matter the disappointments and sullied blunders, today is the opportunity to do right by ourselves.

I started at the age of 8 and have been lucky to be still working.

Fragrance is the voice of inanimate things.

I was the last Republican lieutenant governor and it's been over 20 years.

I'm the least-educated person in my immediate family. My two other brothers have multiple advanced degrees, and I only have one. [...] Actually, now that I've got a Nobel Prize, I feel equal.