“And when women talk about being women, they can never quite get away from the recurrent theme of blaming men.”

Then, too, I want a book so filled with story and character that I read page after page without thinking of food or drink because a writer has possessed me, crazed with an unappeasable thirst to know what happens next.

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.

Not even always preaching but just leading, motivating them by being a leader.

The most important quality in a leader is that of being acknowledged as such. All leaders whose fitness is questioned are clearly lacking in force.

By being happy we sow anonymous benefits upon the world.

[Before being burned at the stake for her faith:] Hold the cross high so I may see it through the flames.

T stands for being nice. T stands for manners. T stands for being polite.

I would feel no hesitation in saying that it is the responsibility of a decent human being to give assistance to a child who is being attacked by a rabid dog.

I was really good at being a bad guy.

There is no duty we so much underrate as the duty of being happy.