Well, marriage doesn't function in the way it used to in terms of deciding our fate, but it's in our heads, and it determines a lot of our actions. Like, right now, if you think about gay marriage - and they just started having the first gay marriages in New York - it shows what a potent idea marriage remains for people.

She'd become an English major for the purest and dullest of reasons: because she loved to read.

I think, especially when you're in college, each book that you're reading tends to tell you who you are.

If Mitchell was ever going to become a good Christian, he would have to stop disliking people so intensely.

Yes, you need a passport to prove to the world that you exist. The people at passport control, they cannot look at you and see you are a person. No! They have to look at a little photograph of you. Then they believe you exist.

Children learn to speak Male or Female the way they learn to speak English or French.

The television replaced the sound of conversation that was missing from my grandparents' lives.