You used to be able to tell a person's nationality by the face. Immigration ended that. Next you discerned nationality via the footwear. Globalization ended that.

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.

What are five things you are grateful for? Right now? Open to gratitude and you will soften into joy.

Do not desire a long life or an early death

We should be more concerned with reaching the lost than pampering the saved.

You surround yourself with amazing, grade-A talent, and you're going to have to lift your game. You kind of thrive just by being around such people.

Italian style for me is to have a sense of tradition, respect for one's roots, and a sartorial approach.

Where lies the final harbor, whence we unmoor no more?

Sociopaths love power. They love winning. If you take loving kindness out of the human brain, there's not much left except the will to win.

If you don't know you're in a state of grace, then you're vulnerable to the paralysis of the accusations of the enemy.

Of course, genes can't pull the levers of our behavior directly. But they affect the wiring and workings of the brain, and the brain is the seat of our drives, temperaments and patterns of thought.

The attempt to remove evil from the world by killing a thousand evil - doers, only adds to the evil in the world.