I love things made out of animals. It's just so funny to think of someone saying, 'I need a letter opener. I guess I'll have to kill a deer.

It's a common mistake for vacationing Americans to assume that everyone around them is French and therefore speaks no English whatsoever. [...] An experienced traveler could have told by looking at my shoes that I wasn't French. And even if I were French, it's not as if English is some mysterious tribal dialect spoken only by anthropologists and a small population of cannibals.

Given enough time, I guess anything can look good. All it has to do is survive.

Maybe one day, I would write a story about arguing in public, and those would come in handy in some way.

I never got the idea of a punishing God, just a really boring one. To see people growing up in the Carolinas who were Baptist, I knew there were others who felt God was going to send them to hell for any little thing, but not me.

I'm for gay elopement, not for gay weddings. I've been with my boyfriend for twenty years. I don't feel like that would validate our relationship in any way. But I would really fight for someone else to have the right. Just elope, though, please.

I didn't know about the rest of the class, but when Bastille Day eventually rolled around, I planned to stay home and clean my oven.