“The body's a funny thing. It's so full of surprises that it makes conventional wisdom seem silly.”

“Time moves funny and it's hard to pin down. Occasionally, time offers you a hundred opportunities to do the right thing. Sometimes, it gives you only one chance.”

“Books are living things and their task lies in their vows of silence. You touch them as they quiver with a divine pleasure. You read them and they fall asleep to happy dreams for the next 10 years. If you do them the favor of understanding them, of taking in their portions of grief and wisdom, then they settle down in contented residence in your heart.”

“She had so mastered the strategies of camouflage that her own history had seemed a series of well-placed mirrors that kept her hidden from herself.”

“The tide was a poem that only time could create, and I watched it stream and brim and makes its steady dash homeward, to the ocean.”

“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.”

“It both surprised and angered me that {they} had reached a consensus of agreement against me. The way I looked at the world, enemies criticized and friends affirmed.”