Here is one of the worst things about having someone you love die: It happens again every single morning.
If your success is not on your own terms, if it looks good to the world but does not feel good in your heart, it is not success at all.
Books are the plane, and the train, and the road. They are the destination, and the journey. They are home.
I would be most content if my children grew up to be the kind of people who think decorating consists mostly of building enough bookshelves.
In books I have traveled, not only to other worlds, but into my own.
those of us who read because we love it more than anything, who feel about bookstores the way some people feel about jewelers…
It turned out that when my younger self thought of taking wing, she wanted only to let her spirit soar. Books are the plane, the train, and the road. They are the destination, and the journey. They are home.
In books I have traveled, not only to other worlds, but into my own. I learned who I was and who I wanted to be, what I might aspire to, and what I might dare to dream about my world and myself.
So much of friendship is about being in the right place at the right time.
the joy of someone who had been a reader all her life, whose world had been immeasurably enlarged by the words of others.
Since the age of five I had been one of those people who was an indefatigable reader, more inclined to go off by myself with a book than do any of the dozens of things that children usually do to amuse themselves. I never aged out of it.
It would take a helluva man to replace no man at all.
We read in bed because reading is halfway between life and dreaming, our own consciousness in someone else’s mind.
A man who builds his own pedestal had better use strong cement.
Your children make it impossible to regret your past. They’re its finest fruits. Sometimes the only ones.
But never fear, gentlemen; castration was really not the point of feminism, and we women are too busy eviscerating one another to take you on.
It’s amazing how resilient people are, and how the things that didn’t come true become,after a while, simply the way things are.
All of us want to do well. But if we do not do good, too, then doing well will never be enough.
Sometimes I live so much in my mind that I forget what is right before my eyes.
The curse of having young people about the house was that they were always so redolent of possibility.
I prize my downtime, count on it as a writer, a parent, a person. Sometimes I think of Woody Allen’s remark about masturbation, that it is sex with someone he loves. I feel as though being alone is hanging out with someone I like.
I don’t even have a dog. I tell people I’m allergic so they won’t think less of me. Instead I have a cat, the pet that ranks just above a throw pillow in terms of responsibility required.
For so long I’d thought about myself as a girl who’d walked away from her mother’s life that it would be a long time before I would start to think about the other part of the bargain, how easily she’d let me go.
There is only room in the lifeboat of your life for one, and you always choose yourself, and turn your parents into whatever it takes to keep you afloat.
The great motherhood friendships are the ones in which two women can admit [how difficult mothering is] quietly to each other, over cups of tea at a table sticky with spilled apple juice and littered with markers without tops.
A loose end – that’s what we woman call it, when we are overwhelmed by the care of small children, the weight of small tasks, a life in which we fall into bed at the end of the day exhausted from being all things to all people.
I’ve discovered that sometimes writing badly can eventually lead to something better. Not writing at all leads to nothing.
I have a cat, the pet that ranks just above a throw pillow in terms of required responsibility.
.. at a certain age we learned to see right through it, and that age is now.
New York City has finally hired women to pick up the garbage, which makes sense to me, since, as I’ve discovered, a good bit of being a woman consists of picking up garbage.
In England I am always madam; I arrived too late to ever be a miss. In New York I have only been madamed once, by the doorman at the Carlyle Hotel.
You can tell a really wonderful quote by the fact that it’s attributed to a whole raft of wits.
The clearest explanation for the failure of any marriage is that two people are incompatible that is one is male and the other female.
But it’s important, while we are supporting lessons in respecting others, to remember that many of our youngest kids need to learn to respect themselves. You learn your worth from the way you are treated.
The clearest explanation for the failure of any marriage is that the two people are incompatible; that is, that one is male and the other female.
I’m sure not afraid of success and I’ve learned not to be afraid of failure. The only thing I’m afraid of now is of being someone I don’t like much.
Children should have enough freedom to be themselves – once they’ve learned the rules.
After all those years as a woman hearing ‘not thin enough, not pretty enough, not smart enough, not this enough, not that enough,’ almost overnight I woke up one morning and thought, ‘I’m enough.’
America is a country that seems forever to be toddler or teenager, at those two stages of human development characterized by conflict between autonomy and security.
Women who marry early are often overly enamored of the kind of man who looks great in wedding pictures and passes the maid of honor his telephone number.
The thing that is really hard, and really amazing, is giving up on being perfect and beginning the work of becoming yourself.
The greatest public health threat for many American women is the men they live with.
Ideas are only lethal if you suppress and don’t discuss them. Ignorance is not bliss, it’s stupid. Banning books shows you don’t trust your kids to think and you don’t trust yourself to be able to talk to them.
There is little premium in poetry in a world that thinks of Pound and Whitman as a weight and a sampler, not an Ezra, a Walt, a thing of beauty, a joy forever.
If I get the forty additional years statisticians say are likely coming to me, I could fit in at least one, maybe two new lifetimes. Sad that only one of those lifetimes can include being the mother of young children.
People always blame the girl; she should have said no. A monosyllable, but conventional wisdom has always been that boys can’t manage it.
I read and walked for miles at night along the beach, writing bad blank verse and searching endlessly for someone wonderful who would step out of the darkness and change my life. It never crossed my mind that that person could be me.