Safer than we are.” I told Franny. “Safer than love.” “let me tell ya kid,” Franny said to me, squeezing my hand. “Everything’s safer than love.

He was one of those people things came easily to, but he did little to demonstrate that he deserved to be gifted.

Newspapers are even worse for me than ice cream; headlines, and the big issues that generate the headlines, are pure fat.

There's no reason you shouldn't, as a writer, not be aware of the necessity to revise yourself constantly.

Dan suggested to Owen and me that we were better off to not involve ourselves with Hester. How true! But how we wanted to be involved in the thrilling real-life sleaziness that we suspected Hester was in the thick-of. We were in a phase, through television and the movies, of living only vicariously. Even faintly sordid silliness excited us if it put us in contact with love.

The first of my father's illusions was that bears could survive the life led by human beings; the second was that human beings could survive a life in hotels.

Whereas she wished more of the population were better educated, she also believed that education was largely wasted on the majority of the people she met.