I was mortified by the prospect of becoming hopelessly trapped in someone else's story.

A lot of people get so hung up on what they can't have that they don't think for a second about whether they really want it.

Many, if not most, countries blithely expect their citizens to have carte blanche access to the U.S., "land of immigrants," as a veritable human right, but put up all manner of barriers to Americans who want to emigrate in the opposite direction.

Perhaps I overemphasized the value of keeping busy.... I liked to imagine that I was incapable of doing nothing for afternoons myself, but maybe what disturbed me was that I was capable of it. I feared this was a knack one could get the hang of rather readily, and it was therefore now lurking in my house waiting for me to pick it up like a winter flu.

I first foreswore motherhood when I was about eight years old. ... [Children] were annoying. We were loud and sneaky and broke things. As an eight-year-old, maybe I was simply mortified by the prospect of being saddled with myself.

it is always difficult to impress the ignorant.

The most sumptuous experience of ingestion is in-between: remembering the last bite and looking forward to the next one.