the joy of someone who had been a reader all her life, whose world had been immeasurably enlarged by the words of others.

Our love of lockstep is our greatest curse, the source of all that bedevils us. It is the source of homophobia, xenophobia, racism, sexism, terrorism, bigotry of every variety and hue, because it tells us...

I will never understand people who think that the way to show their righteous opposition to sexual freedom is to write letters full of filthy words.

One day she had been out walking and she had wondered whether she had become a different person in the last year,…. Then when she really thought about is she realized she’d been becoming different...

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.

People always blame the girl; she should have said no. A monosyllable, but conventional wisdom has always been that boys can’t manage it.

All of us want to do well. But if we do not do good, too, then doing well will never be enough.

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.

I would even go to Washington, which is saying something for me, just to glimpse Jane Q. Public, being sworn in as the first female president of the United States, while her husband holds the...

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.

While we pay lip service to the virtues of reading, the truth is that there is still in our culture something that suspects those who read too much, whatever reading too much means, of being...

I want to be able to remember it all, not just the books but the newsrooms and the playgroups and the bad jokes and the holiday traditions. In my mind I can walk through the...

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.

In the woods it was not so much that it was quiet as that the few sounds were loud and distinct, not the orchestra tuning-up of the city but individual grace notes. Birdcalls broken into...

Whether talking about addiction, taxation [on cigarettes] or education [about smoking], there is always at the center of the conversation an essential conundrum: How come we’re selling this deadly stuff anyway?

Somewhere between a third and a quarter of all people living in America today were born between 1946 and 1965 and if you think you’re tired of hearing about us, you should try being one...

There were a thousand ways to imagine someone unhappy and so few ways to imagine someone contented.

London has the trick of making its past, its long indelible past, always a part of its present. And for that reason it will always have meaning for the future, because of all it can...

Well, we tell our kids things like ‘don’t gossip’ and then an hour later they hear us on the phone. Stuff like that.

“You are the only person alive who has sole custody of your life …Your entire life …Not just the life of your mind, but the life of your heart.Not just your bank account, but your...

Reading is not simply an intellectual pursuit but an emotional and spiritual one. It lights the candle in the hurricane lamp of self; that’s why it survives.”[Turning the Page: The future of reading is backlit...

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.

Ideas are like pizza dough, made to be tossed around.

Speech is the voice of the heart.

It’s important to remember that feminism is no longer a group of organizations or leaders. It’s the expectations that parents have for their daughters, and their sons, too. It’s the way we talk about and...

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.

The thing about old friends is not that they love you, but that they know you. They remember that disastrous New Year’s Eve when you mixed White Russians and champagne, and how you wore that...

I mark my years or parenting by the people who stepped in and forced me to abandon my inclination to meddle, micromanage, and coddle, beginning with my children’s father, who sat me down and told...

The world is full of women blindsided by the unceasing demands of motherhood, still flabbergasted by how a job can be terrific and torturous.

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...

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...

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...

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.

It is so easty to waste our lives: our days, our hours, our minutes…It is so easy to exist instead of live.

The future is built on brains, not prom court, as most people can tell you after attending their high school reunion. But you’d never know it by talking to kids or listening to the messages...

Here is one of the worst things about having someone you love die: It happens again every single morning.

The curse of having young people about the house was that they were always so redolent of possibility.

Being a reporter is as much a diagnosis as a job description

I read and reread and recommended and rarely rejected, became one of those readers who will read trashy stories as long as they’re not too terrible–well, even perhaps the truly terrible ones–and will reread something...

H.L. Mencken once said that Puritanism is the haunting fear that someone, somewhere, may be having a good time. As she looked down at her dead child, Mary Beth realized that the unbearable sense of...

If God had meant Harvard professors to appear in People magazine, She wouldn’t have invented The New York Review of Books.

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.

I would be the most content if my children grew up to be the kind of people who think decorating consists mostly of building enough bookshelves.

The greatest public health threat for many American women is the men they live with.

Every story has already been told. Once you’ve read Anna Karenina, Bleak House, The Sound and the Fury, To Kill a Mockingbird and A Wrinkle in Time, you understand that there is really no reason...

I had that feeling you have when you’re watching a sad movie, sobbing at the heartbreak you are feeling at the same time that you know the heartbreak isn’t exactly real, that it will be...

All parents should be aware that when they mock or curse gay people, they may be mocking or cursing their own child.

Like so many of the other books I read, it never seemed to me like a book, but like a place I had lived in, had visited and would visit again, just as all the...

there is still a kind of unique loneliness to child rearing for women. We so often do it in isolation. Add to the fact that in our competitive, perfectionist culture, in which the price woman...

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...