It doesn't matter how you conceive of divinity. It only matters that you see it in everything, including yourself.

We thought of [New York] as a free city, like one of those storied prewar tropical nests of intrigue and licentiousness where exiles and lamsters and refugees found shelter in a tangle of improbable juxtapositions.

An apple tree is just like a person. In order to thrive, it needs companionship that's similar to it in some ways, but quite different than others.

She is like a meteor shooting off by itself, traveling through space, knowing no bounds, who knows ehere eventually to come to ground, on another planet or back on our earth again, or to disappear in the infinity of nature.

Loving leaders allow for individuality in style and expression.

I'm not prepared for Rue's family. Her parents, whose faces are still fresh with sorrow. Her fiver younger siblings, who resemble her so closely. The slight builds, the luminous brown eyes. They form a flock of small dark birds.

... life wasn't full of problems, it was rich with decisions.

You write what you know, and I know rock and roll.

It occurred to them for the first time in their lives that what's divine can come in dark skin.

A man can forgive all manner of faults in beautiful women that in ugly men he find entirely beyond sufferance

Let her know that her look really works for you.

[Flaubert] didn’t just hate the railway as such; he hated the way it flattered people with the illusion of progress. What was the point of scientific advance without moral advance? The railway would merely permit more people to move about, meet and be stu