It is better to be tied to any thorny bush than to be with a cross man.
I thought I was going to be a math major. My parents were both accountants and wanted me to major in business. Math was our compromise.
The art (as opposed to the technology) of reading requires that you develop a beautiful tolerance for incomprehension. The greatest books are the books that you come to understand more deeply with time, with age and with rereading.
The book is an experience that allows you to witness your feelings without having to surrender to them, to succumb to them, or to be battered by them. It gives you access to a deep knowledge of how you would respond to things you would never, thank goodness, have been required to experience.
A bleak, black book, it engenders awe and despair. I have read it in its entirety 4 12 times, each time finding its resonance and beauty so great as to demand another reading. As I read, I found myself devastated by the thoroughness of the book's annihilating sensibility and revived by the beauty of its language, the complexity of its design, the melancholy, horror and stoic sympathy in its rendering of what we used to call the human condition.
A beautiful word in the middle of a sentence can sometimes reduce me to tears in an interview, and when I'm reading, too. I've sometimes wondered whether I'm at the point of tears all the time because I use my eyes so much that they're strained and on the verge of tears anyway.
She taught you how to be a person who refuses anything but the meaningful.
I'm in charge of the State Department's 60,000-plus people all over the world, 275 posts.
Memory loss is one way of coping with damage.
If a man possesses a repentant spirit his sins will disappear, but if he has an unrepentant spirit his sins will continue and condemn him for their sake forever.
The reason I was successful in launching my first book with bloggers is this: I assumed that I should spend as much time on a blogger with a million-person readership as I would pitching an editor of a publication with a million person subscription-base.