Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
There is a little boy inside the man who is my brother... Oh, how I hated that little boy. And how I love him too.
We read in bed because reading is halfway between life and dreaming, our own consciousness in someone else's mind.
All of the qualities that you need to be a good opinion columnist tend to be qualities that aren't valued in women.
All parents should be aware that when they mock or curse gay people, they may be mocking or cursing their own child.
This is why I had children: to offer them a perfect dream of childhood that can fill their souls as they grow older.
Keeping kids safe is sometimes a delusion. The world is a perilous place. Sometimes the kitchen is a perilous place.
Well, we tell our kids things like 'don't gossip' and then an hour later they hear us on the phone. Stuff like that.
For most of my life the only ceremonies I've been to at which women were the stars were weddings. So I like weddings.
I'm very optimistic. I think if you would describe me, my pretty consistent affect is that I'm a pretty happy person.
I was very driven, very focused, very ambitious. I mean, when I look back on myself in my 20s, part of me just cringes.
Maybe I had three children in the first place so I wouldn't ever have to play board games. In my religion, martyrs die.
All of life like a series of tableaux, and in the living we missed so much, hid so much, left so much undone and unsaid.
the joy of someone who had been a reader all her life, whose world had been immeasurably enlarged by the words of others.
Don't ever forget the words on a postcard that my father sent me last year: "If you win the rat race, you're still a rat.
My father really, really pushed me to excel in a way that I resented for years and then realized had really worked for me.
the most sacred business of judges is not to ratify the will of the majority but to protect the minority from its tyranny.
I remember adolescence, the years of having the impulse control of a mousetrap, of being as private as a safe-deposit box.
If God had meant Harvard professors to appear in People magazine, She wouldn't have invented The New York Review of Books.
A life of unremitting caution, without the carefree - or even, occasionally, the careless - may turn out to be half a life.
The one thing that I always got positive reinforcement for from teachers, who really changed my life, was the written word.
I've been a feminist since I was a teenager, but originally it was because I wanted to make the world a better place for me.
Wow, so much of the way I've transacted my life... so much of the results that I'm happy about are because of what Daddy did.
The thing that is really hard, and really amazing, is giving up on being perfect and beginning the work of becoming yourself.
Those of us who read because we love it more than anything, who feel about bookstores the way some people feel about jewelers.
Jane Austen may not be the best writer, but she certainly writes about the best people. And by that I mean people just like me.
Over the last twenty years, we've changed the world just enough to make it radically different, but not enough to make it work.
This is how I learn most of what I know about my children and their friends: by sitting in the driver's seat and keeping quiet.
One of the useful things about age is realizing conventional wisdom is often simply inertia with a candy coating of conformity.
I am a good friend to my husband. I have tried to make my marriage vows mean what they say. I show up. I listen. I try to laugh.
Life is not so much about beginnings and endings as it is about going on and on and on. It is about muddling through the middle.
And a great misunderstanding is that children think their parents are grown-up, and parents feel obliged to act as if they were.
You're like a cake when you're young. You can't rush it or it will fall, or just turn out wrong. Rising takes patience, and heat.
Women writers of all people should know better than to pigeonhole women, put them in little groups, the smart one, the sweet one.
Like cellulite creams or hair-loss tonics, capital punishment is one of those panaceas that isn't. Only it costs a whole lot more.
Look back, to slavery, to suffrage, to integration and one thing is clear. Fashions in bigotry come and go. The right thing lasts.
Real friends offer both hard truths and soft landings and realize that it's sometimes more important to be nice than to be honest.
Barack Obama is the kind of guy who likes to do things by inches, he's the kind of guy who likes to build consensus and compromise.
If there is anyone who's living the work of the New Testament, it's the nuns of the Catholic church and not the Catholic hierarchy.
The truth is that when you're writing a novel you're really living in it; you're living in the house, and you're living in the town.
Amid attempts to protect elephants from ivory poachers and dolphins from tuna nets, the rights of children go remarkably unremarked.
Ignorant free speech often works against the speaker. That is one of several reasons why it must be given rein instead of suppressed.
Reading is another thing that has made me more human by exposing me to worlds I might never have entered and people I might never meet.
When an actress takes off her clothes onscreen but a nursing mother is told to leave, what message do we send about the roles of women?
That's what makes life so hard for women, that instead of thinking that this is the way things are, we always think it's the way we are.
I believe that in a contest between the living and the almost living, the latter must, if necessary, give way to the will of the former.
I was doing the family grocery shopping accompanied by two children, an event I hope to see included in the Olympics in the near future.
People always blame the girl; she should have said no. A monosyllable, but conventional wisdom has always been that boys can't manage it.
My father expected his first child to be a boy, and when it didn't turn out that way he didn't let the fact get in the way of a good story.
I think I'm like most novelists in that my books have gotten farther and farther away from autobiography the longer I've been writing them.
The world is full of women blindsided by the unceasing demands of motherhood, still flabbergasted by how a job can be terrific and tortuous.