Reading is not simply an intellectual pursuit but an emotional and spiritual one. It lights the candle in the hurricane lamp of self; that's why it survives

Wow, so much of the way I've transacted my life... so much of the results that I'm happy about are because of what Daddy did.

I think at every moment in the last probably 100 years, when the institutional church had the opportunity to do the right thing, they did the wrong thing. They're a dying institution in many parts of the world because they refuse to ordain women or married people. And now they're a dying institution because some of their members did enormous harm to young people and instead of responding aggressively with humility, and with love, and with the confession of wrongdoing, they tried to spin it as though they were a political party, and that's just deplorable.

If I get the forty additional years statisticians say are likely coming to me, I could fit in at least one, maybe two new lifetimes. Sad that only one of those lifetimes can include being the mother of young children.

A finished person is a boring person.

Well, we tell our kids things like 'don't gossip' and then an hour later they hear us on the phone. Stuff like that.

Women writers of all people should know better than to pigeonhole women, put them in little groups, the smart one, the sweet one.