I think I would have liked to have been a twin... Sometimes my sisters and I get mistaken for twins, and I always take it as a compliment.

I was 16 years old, attending boarding school, and I loved Pride and Prejudice. From the opening pages, I loved it. And I will say in my class, not one but two boys told me that I reminded them of Lizzy Bennet. I didn't realize it at the time but this was the nicest thing that any male would ever say to me. This was as good as it got.

To remain alone did not seem to me a terrible fate, no worse than being falsely joined to another person.

If I'm at somebody's house and they have magazines on the table and people are chatting, I feel almost a physical urge to start reading the magazines instead of talking to people.

My boarding school experience was the only thing I had strong enough feelings to write about for hundreds and hundreds of pages. I can still smell the formaldehyde of the fetal pigs in biology.

I had the fleeting thought then that we are each of us pathetic in one way or another, and the trick is to marry a person whose patheticness you can tolerate.

Before and after... I heard a thousand times that a boy, or a man, can't make you happy, that you have to be happy on your own before you can be happy with another person. All I can say is, I wish it were true.