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

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

You realize that especially when you're writing a book like this, looking back on your life, that there's just such a depth of understanding you acquire over time with the help of the people who love you that that's when you can really get down to what you really think and believe.

Figuring out who you are is the whole point of the human experience.

It is so easy to waste our lives: our days, our hours, our minutes. It is so easy to take for granted the pale new growth on an evergreen, the sheen of the limestone on Fifth Avenue, the colour of our kids’ eyes, the way the melody in a symphony rises and falls and disappears and rises again. It is so easy to exist instead of live. Unless you know there is a clock ticking.

For most of my life the only ceremonies I've been to at which women were the stars were weddings. So I like weddings.

I stopped going to mass, and boy, it was painful for me, and it was certainly painful for my family, but I just couldn't ratify their behavior and their decisions anymore by showing up on Sundays.