Mark Twain was very unhappy with himself for various reasons. He was very unhappy with America of this time. He thought it was terrible we had no anti-lynching laws, and he was also a feminist, and he was also very concerned with anti-Semitism. He was a good man, but he was hard on himself.

Even as a young child, I was a lover of books and of the spaces in which, as indeed in a sacred temple, books might safely reside.

It is only through disruptions and confusion that we grow, jarred out of ourselves by the collision of someone else's private world with our own.

When you give up struggle, there's a kind of love.

Sometimes I stumble upon a wonderfully irresistible to me voice, unexpectedly.

There is an hour when you realize: here is what you have been given. More than this, you won't receive. And what this is, what your life has come to, will be taken from you. In time.

For what are the words with which to summarize a lifetime, so much crowded confused happiness terminated by such stark slow-motion pain?