“...weddings are giant Rorschach tests onto which everyone around you projects their fears, fantasies, and expectations -- many of which they've been cultivating since the day you were born.”

“WHEN I WAS LITTLE, I was so girlie and ambitious, I was practically a drag queen. I wanted to be everything at once: a prima ballerina, an actress, a model, a famous artist, a nurse, an Ice Capades dancer, and Batgirl. I spent inordinate amounts of time waltzing around our living room with a doily on my head, imagining in great detail my promenade down the runway as the new Miss America, during which time I would also happen to receive a Nobel Prize for coloring.”

“A girl doesn't need a guy in her life in order to act like a complete idiot. Certainly I, at least, never have.”

“Every woman should see herself looking uniquely breathtaking, in something tailored to celebrate her body, so that she is better able to appreciate her own beauty and better equipped to withstand the ideals of our narrow-waisted, narrow- minded culture.”

“Good girls don't hurt other people's feelings. Good girls are not overly aggressive, competitive, or boastful. Good girls please others. But what good girls are good for is another question.”

“I’m aware that there is a bigger, far more complicated world out there than I’d ever realized, and just like the students at Beijing University, I’ve glimpsed it only fleetingly, peripherally. I’ve sensed the vast expanse of my own ignorance now. I feel antsy and constricted and a deep, almost sexual yearning for velocity, for some sort of raw, transcendent experience that I cannot even begin to articulate.”

“Everything became a metaphor, a talisman, a sign that I was still actually connected to people—that I wasn’t so completely on my own.”