“I do not have any other way of saying it. I think it happens but once and only to the very young when it feels like your skin could ignite at the mere touch of another person. You get to love like that but once.”

Then another porpoise broke the water and rolled toward us. A third and fourth porpoise neared. The visitation was something so rare and perfect that we knew by instinct not to speak-and then as quickly as they had come, the porpoises moved away from us…

Anyone who knows me well must understand and be sympathetic to my genuine need to be my own greatest hero. It is not a flaw of character; it is a catastrophe.

Happiness is an accident of nature, a beautiful and flawless aberration.

Tell me everything that I must know. Hold nothing back.

She had so mastered the strategies of camouflage that her own history had seemed a series of well-placed mirrors that kept her hidden from herself.

Evil would always come to me disguised in systems and dignified by law.

When mom and dad went to war the only prisoners they took were the children

South Carolina is not a state; it is a cult.

If the writing is good, then the result seems effortless and inevitable. But when you want to say something life-changing or ineffable in a single sentence, you face both the limitations of the sentence itself and the extent of your own talent.

Books are living things and their task lies in their vows of silence.

A recipe is a story that ends with a good meal.

Men are prisoners of their genitalia and women are the keepers of the keys to paradise.

My attraction to story is a ceaseless current that runs through the center of me. My inexhaustible ardor for reading seems connected to my hunger for storylines that show up in both books and in the great tumbling chaos of life.

Baseball fans love numbers. They love to swirl them around their mouths like Bordeaux wine.

American men are allotted just as many tears as American women. But because we are forbidden to shed them.

One can learn anything, anything at all, I thought, if provided by a gifted and passionate teacher.

Bad User on Device is a medium that can dynamically simulate the details of any other medium, including media that cannot exist physically.

I’d rather be David Ladd’s father than Alan Ladd any day.

There’s nobody to believe in anymore, nobody to trust.

Any journey around Islington involves hundreds of speed bumps that seem to tear the bottom of your car off.

Or any other thing – are those people in danger of losing their salvation over those issues?

I don’t really worry about the size of the part much any more.

You don’t have to bother with men, they believe any compliment automatically.

I think that any time you look at the fact that boycotts have historically led to change, whatever temporary inconvenience there may be, it in the long run leads toward, in my opinion, a better change for everybody.