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

In life we're most hell-bent on proving things that we're not really sure are true.

Foolish names and foolish faces often appear in public places.

The better you learn to take care of yourself, the less you settle for being around people who can't or won't treat you as well as you're accustomed.

I guess because twins have this mystique, and triplets - I think the normal sibling connection potentially can be very powerful, and there's this idea that it's even more powerful. It really is, not just someone like me, but another version of me.

She was the reason I was a reader, and being a reader was what had made me most myself; it had given me the gifts of curiosity and sympathy, an awareness of the world as an odd and vibrant contradictory place, and it had me unafraid of its oddness and vibrancy and contradictions.

And I am pretty sure that's the point of reading fiction -- so someone else can say in a way you never would have something you recognize immediately.