She wasn’t stupid. She just didn’t want to put her neuron power into long sentences.

What is it the I’ll want from you? Not love: that would be too much to ask. Not forgiveness, which isn’t yours to bestow. Only a listener, perhaps; only someone who will see me. Don’t...

…we must be a beacon of hope, because if you tell people there’s nothing they can do, they will do worse than nothing.

Modesty is invisibility…Never forget it. To be seen—to be seen—is to be…penetrated. What you must be girls, is impenetrable.

How much misery . . . how much needless despair has been caused by a series of biological mismatches, a misalignment of the hormones and pheromones? Resulting in the fact that the one you love...

But it seems she’d wanted children after all, because when she was told she’d been accidentally sterilized she could feel all the light leaking out of her.

What else can I do? Once you’ve gone this far you aren’t fit for anything else. Something happens to your mind. You’re overqualified, overspecialized, and everybody knows it. Nobody in any other game would be...

You all right?” he said again.I didn’t love him, I was far away from him, it was as though I was seeing him through a smeared window or glossy paper; he didn’t belong here. But...

I was tired of her getting away with being so young.

Heroes need monsters to establish their heroic credentials. You need something scary to overcome.

Sooner or later, I hate to break it to you, you’re gonna die, so how do you fill in the space between here and there? It’s yours. Seize your space.

If you feel that there’s the author and then the character, then the book is not working. People have a habit of identifying the author with the narrator, and you can’t, obviously, be all of...

There would be no Sherlock Holmes if it were not for serial publication.

No wires tender even as nervescan transmit the impact ofour seasons, our catastropheswhile we are closed inside them

A word after a word after a word is power

If they want a monster so badly they ought to be provided by one.

I thought my heart was pure. We do like to have such good opinions of our own motives when we’re about to do something harmful, to someone else.

How furious she must be, now that she’s been taken at her word.

The truth is seldom welcome, especially at dinner.

Variation on the Word SleepI would like to watch you sleeping,which may not happen.I would like to watch you,sleeping. I would like to sleepwith you, to enteryour sleep as its smooth dark waveslides over my...

You shouldn’t do that,” said Laura. “You could set yourself on fire.

If he had known unstructured space is a delugeand stocked his log house-boat with all the animals even the wolves, he might have floated. But obstinate hestated, The land is solid and stamped, watching his...

I feel despised there, for having so little money; also for once having had so much. I never actually had it, of course. Father had it, and then Richard. But money was imputed to me,...

Men are afraid that women will laugh at them. Women are afraid that men will kill them.

Then we had the irises, rising beautiful and cool on their tall stalks, like blown glass, like pastel water momentarily frozen in a splash, light blue, light mauve, and the darker ones, velvet and purple,...

But unshed tears can turn rancid. So can memory. So can biting your tongue. My bad nights were beginning. I couldn’t sleep.

I hope that people will finally come to realize that there is only one ‘race’ – the human race – and that we are all members of it.

We shouldn’t be saying ‘Save the planet’; we should be saying: ‘Save viable conditions in which people can live.’ That’s what we’re dealing with here.

I’m not interested in cutting the feet off my characters or stretching them to make them fit my certain political view.

Writers and books are cheap dates, especially when you compare the cost of a book with a ticket to the opera – or an NHL game.

Night falls. Or has fallen. Why is it that night falls, instead of rising, like the dawn? Yet if you look east, at sunset, you can see night rising, not falling; darkness lifting into the...

What a moron I was to think you were sweet and innocent, when it turns out you were actually college-educated the whole time!

It is very odd to be standing in a locked room in the Penitentiary, speaking with a strange man about France and Italy and Germany. A travelling man. He must be a wanderer, like Jeremiah...

But the body had its own cultural forms. It had its own art. Executions wereits tragedies, pornography was its romance.

I believe in the resistance as I believe there can be no light without shadow; or rather, no shadow unless there is also light.

One of the gravestones in the cemetery near the earliest church has an anchor on it and an hourglass, and the words In Hope.In Hope. Why did they put that above a dead person? Was...

War is what happens when language fails.

We were the people who were not in the papers. We lived in the blank white spaces at the edges of print. It gave us more freedom.We lived in the gaps between the stories.

In the old days, trouble was kept in the family, which is still the best place for it, not that there’s ever a best place for trouble. Why stir everything up again after that many...

But she went to tell the bees. She felt like an idiot doing it, but she’d promised. She remembered that it wasn’t enough just to think at them: you had to say the words out...

I always thought eating was a ridiculous activity anyway. I’d get out of it myself if I could, though you’ve got to do it to stay alive, they tell me.

Life is warped. I’m just in sync.

…otherwise, one of you, most likely the man, would go wandering off on a trajectory of his own, taking his addictive body with him and leaving you with bad withdrawal, which you could counteract by...

We still think of a powerful man as a born leader and a powerful woman as an anomaly.

Debt is part of the human condition. Civilization is based on exchanges – on gifts, trades, loans – and the revenges and insults that come when they are not paid back.

Science and fiction both begin with similar questions: What if? Why? How does it all work? But they focus on different areas of life on earth.

Foreignness is all around. Only in the heart of the heart of the country, namely the heart of the United States, can you avoid such a thing. In the center of an empire, you can...

Just think of it as a very, very long pen.

You think you can get rid of things, and people too–leave them behind. You don’t know yet about the habit they have, of coming back.

A lot of people call you a feminist painter.””What indeed,” I say. “I hate party lines, I hate ghettos. Anyway. I’m too old to have invented it and you’re too young to understand it, so...