There are things that can be accomplished only by violence. Physical love is unthinkable without violence.

The more vast the amount of time we've left behind us, the more irresistible is the voice calling us to return to it.

What does it mean to live in truth? Putting it negatively is easy enough: it means not lying, not hiding, and not dissimulating.

A mismatched outfit, a slightly defective denture, an exquisite mediocrity of the soul-those are the details that make a woman real, alive. The women you see on posters or in fashion magazines-the ones all the women try to imitate nowadays-how can they be attractive? They have no reality of their own; they're just the sum of a set of abstract rules. They aren't born of human bodies; they hatch ready-made from the computers." ~The Book of Laughter and Forgetting

To rebel against being born a woman seemed as foolish to her as to take pride in it.

Today I know this: when it comes time to take stock, the most painful wound is that of broken friendships; and there is nothing more foolish than to sacrifice a friendship to politics.

To be a writer does not mean to preach a truth, it means to discover a truth.