I think when people keep saying to you, "You're good at this," you just keep doing it.

the most sacred business of judges is not to ratify the will of the majority but to protect the minority from its tyranny.

Ask any woman how she makes it through the day, and she may mention her calendar, her to-do lists, her babysitter. But if you push her on how she really makes it through her day, she will mention her girlfriends.

I think books in which people are really happy and things are going well are probably the most challenging novels there are to write, and there are very few of them.

Amid attempts to protect elephants from ivory poachers and dolphins from tuna nets, the rights of children go remarkably unremarked.

A week in the hospital she had told us. A hysterectomy, she had said. It had seemed unremarkable to me in a woman of forty-six long finished with childbearing, although every day that I grow older I realize there is never anything unremarkable about losing any part of what makes you female - a breast, a womb, a child, a man.

Sometimes we don't see out of our peripheral vision what's coming right around the corner.