“Books and people are alike in one respect: they're both full of thoughts.”

“Everytime we use an invention or read a book or study a science or listen to music, we’re enjoying someone else’s idea— someone who may have lived thousands of years ago, and thousands of miles away from here.”

“Somehow, when a person you like reads your poem and says they like it, the poem seems all fresh and new afterwards. I wonder why?”

“When all men think alike, no one thinks very much.”

“That's how it was on Irving Circle and how I was raised: You made the best out of what was within reach, which meant friendships engineered by parents and by the happenstance of housing. I stayed with it because we both had queenly older sisters who rarely condescended to play with us, because Shelley was adopted and I was not, because Shelley had Clue and Life, and I did not”

“...the state should support art,construed not as amusement but as one of the chief carriers of civilization.”

“It was a noteworthy lesson, even for someone who'd been fed a daily diet of italicized lessons: that people in high places, luminaries with advanced degrees in Classics and in possession of excellent manners, can disappoint you as profoundly as anyone else.”