You think you're the foreigner here, and I'm the American, and I just look the other way while the President or somebody sends down this and that . . . to torture people with. But nobody asked my permission, okay? Sometimes I feel like I'm a foreigner, too.

Value is not made of money, but a tender balance of expectation and longing.

People's dreams are made out of what they do all day. The same way a dog that runs after rabbits will dream of rabbits. It's what you do that makes your soul, not the other way around.

I never think that anything I'm writing is bluntly political in any way. I'm not going for commentary.

A person could spend most of a lifetime in retrospective terror, thinking of all the things one nearly didn't do.

Recall that whatever lofty things you might accomplish today, you will do them only because you first ate something that grew out of the dirt.

A woman without a man -- a condition of 'manlessness' -- is defined as alone. But a single mother is less alone than the average housewife.