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.

She opened her mouth but did not immediately speak, and I felt, simultaneously, the impulse to coax the words from her and the impulse to suppress them. I always thought I wanted to know a secret, or I wanted an event to unfold – I wanted my life to start – but in those rare moments when it seemed like something might actually change, panic shot through me.

I'm SO trying to give up meat.

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.

We all make mistakes, don't we? But if you can't forgive yourself, you'll always be an exile in your own life.

It's never that hard for me to imagine what it must feel like to be someone else, whether it's an American teenage girl or a Japanese octogenarian man