She was thirty-nine. No, she did not envy her eighteen-year- old self at all. But she did envy, envied every day more bitterly, that young girl's genuine independence, largeness, scope, and courage.

Parents should leave books lying around marked "forbidden" if they want their children to read.

I was filled with such a dangerous delicious intoxication that I could have walked straight off the steps into the air, climbing on the strength of my own drunkeness into the stars. And the intoxication, as I knew even then, was the recklessness of infinite possibility.

We use our parents like recurring dreams, to be entered into when needed.

There is only one real sin and that is to persuade oneself that the second best is anything but second best.

The great secret that all old people share is that you really haven't changed in seventy or eighty years. Your body changes, but you don't change at all. And that, of course, causes great confusion.

Writers do not come out of houses without books.