I would always be a better hater of things and institutions than a lover of them.

It is the secret life that sustains me now, and as I reach the top of that bridge I say it in a whisper, I say it as a prayer, as regret, and as praise. I can't tell you why I do it or what it means, but each night when I drive toward my southern home and my southern life, I whisper these words: 'Lowenstein, Lowenstein.

Laughter is the only strategy that has ever worked at all for me when my world is falling apart.

There is no teacher more discriminating or transforming than loss.

Few things linger longer or become more indwelling than that feeling of both completion and emptiness when a great book ends. That the book accompanies the reader forever from that day forward is part of literature's profligate generosity.

Except for memory, time would have no meaning at all.

Rape is a crime against sleep and memory; it's afterimage imprints itself like an irreversible negative from the camera obscura of dreams.