One can learn anything, anything at all, I thought, if provided by a gifted and passionate teacher.

When men talk about the agony of being men, they can never quite get away from the recurrent theme of self-pity. And when women talk about being women, they can never quite get away from the recurrent theme of blaming men.

But even her demons she invested with inordinate beauty, consecrated them with the dignity of her attention.

Because she deserved my tears if anyone on earth ever did. I could feel the tears within me, undiscovered, and untouched in their inland sea. Those tears had been with me always.

She had awakened something in him that had slumbered far too long. Not only did he feel passion, he felt the return of hope.

My mother thought of my father as half barbarian and half blunt instrument, and she isolated him from his children.

There is such a thing as too much beauty in a woman and it is often a burden as crippling as homeliness and far more dangerous. It takes much luck and integrity to survive the gift of perfect beauty, and its impermanence is its most cunning betrayal.