"How strange it is, to be walking away. Is it possible that I am really going to leave Ray-here? Is it possible that he won't be coming home with me in another day or two, as we'd planned? Such a thought is too profound for me to grasp. It's like fitting a large unwieldy object in a small space. My brain hurts, trying to contain it."

"Like a turnip such a head could be blown away very easily. For where a man was weak, a woman has unmanned him. It would be a mercy to blow such a man away."

"We inhabit ourselves without valuing ourselves unable to see that here now this very moment is sacred but once it's gone-its value is incontestable."

"The city reeked of death, and the savages that resided within its imposing starkness existed in fear of their lives. They had been shocked by the recent bloody Whitechapel murders, as if starvation, disease, moral degradation, and perpetual smog drowning all color in gray wasn't enough to bring home the pathetic reality of their miserable existence. The police were no nearer to capturing the monster that lurked in the crevices, and London seemed stiller in the dark, the streets devoid of hope."

"Can compromise be an art? Yes--but a minor art."

"Where we come from in America no longer signifies. It's where we go, and what we do when we get there, that tells us who we are."

"It had seemed to me an elegant nightmare concoction made by adults for adults, to further the aims and fantasies of adults, and what have children to do with such things?"

"The relationship between parents and children, but especially between mothers and daughters, is tremendously powerful, scarcely to be comprehended in any rational way."

"There are some secrets so toxic you can't share. Especially if you love who it is you'd have to share with."

"Reading is the sole means by which we slip, involuntarily, often helplessly, into another's skin, another's voice, another's soul."

"The demon blood inside me burned my soul to ashes long ago.I am a monster who once dreamed he was a man. Never mistakeme again."

"The danger of motherhood. you relive your early self, through the eyes of your mother."

"As a farm girl, even when I was quite young, I had my 'farm chores' - but I had time also to be alone, to explore the fields, woods and creek side. And to read."

"Nowhere in a hospital can you walk without blundering into the memory pools of strangers-their dread of what was imminent in their lives, their false hopes, the wild elation of their hopes, their sudden terrible and irrefutable knowledge; you would not wish to hear echoes of their whispered exchanges-But he was looking so well yesterday, what has happened to him overnight."

"The innocence of such children doesn't answer our deepest questions about this vale of tears to which we are condemned, but it helps to dispel them. That is the secret to family life."

"You never give such relationships a thought, To give a thought, to take a thought is a function of dissociation, distance. You can't exercise memory until you've removed yourself from memory's source."

"And remember: you must not overwork your body, or your soul. You must not enslave yourself, as you would not enslave any other person. You must be the custodian of your self."

"The challenge is to resist circumstances. Any idiot can be happy in a happy place, but moral courage is required to be happy in a hellhole."

"So you don't believe we have souls I guess?' and Legs laughed and said, 'Yeah probably we do but why's that mean we're gonna last forever? Like a flame is real enough, isn't it, while it's burning?-even if there's a time it goes out?'"

"The coolly calibrated manipulation of the credulous American public, by an administration bent upon stoking paranoid patriotism!"

"A broken heart is something even I can't protect you from. I've been alone for so long, and believe me, all that does is provide a false sense of security. Being alone doesn't erase the deep yearning that exists in all of us. We are not solitary creatures. You have to love and open your heart. If not, what is it we are trying to save? When it swallows you whole, remember it means you've lived."

"Be daring, take on anything. Don't labor over little cameo works in which every word is to be perfect. Technique holds a reader from sentence to sentence, but only content will stay in his mind."

"I feel very transparent in myself. I'm more of an observer. I'm interested in what's going on. I'm not sure that I really have a personality. Some people think I do have a personality. I have a personality when I am with certain people - but when I'm not with them I don't have that personality. I just sort of go back to resembling a transparent glass of water."

"He had no idea of my misery. It would have surprised him to think that I was a human creature with a soul."

"Anyone who teaches knows that you don't really experience a text until you've taught it, in loving detail, with an intelligent and responsive class."

"Derailed. In exile. Deeply ashamed, despised. Yet she had so little pride, she was grateful most days simply to be alive.There is Minimalist art; there are minimalist lives."

"Boxing is about being hit rather more than it is about hitting, just as it is about feeling pain, if not devastating psychological paralysis, more than it is about winning."

"Keep a light, hopeful heart. But expect the worst."

"Warum man schreibt, ist eine Frage, die sich der Schriftsteller, völlig versunken in seine Arbeit, nicht stellt. Theorien sind das Gebiet derer, die nicht handeln.“

"Legs was always proud even before FOXFIRE, that's the primary fact about Legs Sadovsky: pride."

"As a teacher at Princeton, I'm surrounded by people who work hard so I just make good use of my time. And I don't really think of it as work - writing a novel, in one sense, is a problem-solving exercise."

"We are stimulated to emotional response, not by works that confirm our sense of the world, but by works that challenge it."

"Still, I am angry with him. I am very angry with him. With my poor dead defenseless husband, I am furious as I was rarely-perhaps never-furious with him, in life. How can I forgive you, you've ruined both our lives."

"To write a novel is to embark on a quest that is very romantic. People have visions, and the next step is to execute them. That's a very romantic project. Like Edvard Munch's strange dreamlike canvases where people are stylized, like 'The Scream.' Munch must have had that vision in a dream, he never saw it."

"Love commingled with hate is more powerful than love. Or hate."

"For writing is a solitary occupation, and one of its hazards is loneliness. But an advantage of loneliness is privacy, autonomy, freedom."

"For what are the words with which to summarize a lifetime, so much crowded confused happiness terminated by such stark slow-motion pain?"

"When my brother called to inform me, on the morning of May 22, 2003, that our mother Caroline Oates had died suddenly of a stroke, it was a shock from which, in a way, I have yet to recover."

"The third man in the ring makes boxing possible."

"But he doesn't love her. I invented that. It is a plot if you imagine people in love--the lazy looping criss crosses of love, blows, stares, tears. No. It doesn't happen. No love. People meet, touch, stare into one another's faces, shake their heads clear, move on, forget. It doesn't happen."

"In love there are two things - bodies and words."

"Art serves a purpose. It expands our horizons, frees our minds, and opens us up to new experiences. It opens the imagination. All these great discoveries of our time - without the desire to reach beyond our boundaries, we would be forever stagnant. The folly is in closing one's eyes and not recognizing it."

"It is not her body that he wants but it is only through her body that he can take possession of another human being, so he must labor upon her body, he must enter her body, to make his claim."

"We are linked by blood, and blood is memory without language."

"Adriana loved even the rank animal smell of the man's body, her sweat-slicked breasts and belly flattened beneath him, and her arms and legs clutching him as a drowning woman might clutch another person to save her life. Don't don't don't don't leave me. DON'T LEAVE ME. As in animal copulation the frenzy is to be locked together not out of sentiment or choice but physical compulsion. As if bolts of electric current ran through both their bodies and would only release them from each other when it ceased."

"And I like your laugh, Sabbath; it's inaudible."

"When you're fifty you start thinking about things you haven't thought about before. I used to think getting old was about vanity-but actually it's about losing people you love. Getting wrinkles is trivial."

"If you are a writer you locate yourself behind a wall of silence and no matter what you are doing, driving a car or walking or doing housework you can still be writing, because you have that space."

"It is utterly naive, futile, uninformed-to think that our species is exceptional. So designated to master the beasts of the Earth, as in the Book of Genesis!"

"It is the most horrific thought-my husband died among strangers."