“The sign of a true woman isn't the ability to recite French poetry or play the pianoforte or cook Chateaubriand. The sign of a true woman is learning to listen to her own voice even when society does its best to drown it out.”

“ "God, you're a good kisser," he said. "Where'd you learn to do that?"I sat up and flashed him a deadpan look. "Books," I said.”

“Somehow I could lose myself in the ocean the same way I could lose myself in a good book. Maybe it was because both involved suspension--a suspension of weight, a suspension of disbelief--a willingness to surrender to something greater than oneself.”

“I want to read so I can read the Koran read the signs in the street know the number of the bus I'm supposed to take when I one day leave this house.”

“Each woman is like an instrument, waiting to be learned, loved, and finely played, to have at last her own true music made.”

“My trip to the former Yugoslavia had opened the world for me, and my hunger for the world. In doing so, it undid the contained, safe borders of my existence. Suddenly a woman weeping over her lost son in an image on the front page of The New York Times was no longer a theoretical entity. She was real, a woman I might have met, might have known. I was connected to her. I could no longer divorce myself from her pain, her suffering. Initially this was overwhelming. I had nightmares. I felt restless and wrong in my comforting life in America. Everything seemed absurd and pointless. I came to understand why we block out the pain and atrocities of others. That pain, if we allow it to enter us, makes our lives impossible. It forces us to examine our own values and reality. It insists that we be responsible for others. It thrusts us into the messy world where there are no easy solutions or reasons, only struggles and questions. It creates great fissures in the landscape of our insulated, so-called safe reality. Fissures that, once split open, can never close again. It compels us to act.”

“An unhappily married woman is necessarily a bad cook.”