There was a time when we expected nothing of our children but obedience, as opposed to the present, when we expect everything of them but obedience.

Two people making love, she once said, are like one drowned person resuscitating the other.

The tension between 'yes' and no', between 'I can' and 'I cannot,' makes us feel that, in so many instances, human life is an interminable debate with one's self.

The first divorce in the world may have been a tragedy, but the hundred-millionth is not necessarily one.

Aphorisms are bad for novels. They stick in the reader's teeth.

In novels, I said, people are transfigured by love. They’re elevated, made different, lifted out of their ordinariness…It’s not so much to ask, I said. I just want love to live up to its publicity.

The epic implications of being human end in more than this: We start our lives as if they were momentous stories, with a beginning, a middle and an appropriate end, only to find that they are mostly middles.