We read in bed because reading is halfway between life and dreaming, our own consciousness in someone else's mind.

Trying to be perfect may be inevitable for people who are smart and ambitious and interested in the world and its good opinion...What is really hard, and really amazing, is giving up on being perfect and beginning the work of becoming yourself.

The thing that is really hard, and really amazing, is giving up on being perfect and beginning the work of becoming yourself.

A life of unremitting caution, without the carefree - or even, occasionally, the careless - may turn out to be half a life.

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

Reading has always been life unwrapped to me, a way of understanding the world and understanding myself through both the unknown and the everyday. If being a parent consists often of passing along chunks of ourselves to unwitting-often unwilling-recipients, then books are, for me, one of the simplest and most sure-fire ways of doing that.

For many years, despite what I thought were really punitive decisions about women in the church, I stayed and stayed and stayed. I kept saying to myself, "The Catholic church is my church, and by God, I'm going to stay here, despite what the hierarchy does."