A perfect world or a world destroyed, one or the other- someday will come the end of hell.

I think love can save the world. When we love, we completely recognize the value of the other.

Aren't there gradations of evil? Is evil a great perilous gulf into which one falls with the first sin, plummeting to the depth?

I claim Dickens as a mentor. He's my teacher. He's one of my driving forces.

All my life,I've been afraid of things, as a child and a woman must be. I lied about it naturally. I fancied myself a witch and walked in dark streets to punish myself for my doubts. But I knew what it meant to be afraid.

It's so easy to persecute an older, overweight, unwise, crude, ignorant woman who may very well be a good person at heart who has achieved a great deal in her life. So easy to vilify her and hate her and try to destroy her life. Woe to anyone today who is not slender, young, clever and politically correct.

A summer rain had left the night clean and sparkling with drops of water. I leaned against the end pillar of the gallery, my head touching the soft tendrils of a jasmine which grew there in a constant battle with a wisteria, and I thought of what lay before me throughout the world and throughout time, and resolved to go about it delicately and reverently, learning that from each thing which would take me best to another.