“It would take a helluva man to replace no man at all.”

“The thing about old friends is not that they love you, but that they know you. They remember that disastrous New Year's Eve when you mixed White Russians and champagne, and how you wore that red ma...”

“Speech is the voice of the heart.”

“But never fear, gentlemen; castration was really not the point of feminism, and we women are too busy eviscerating one another to take you on.”

“We read in bed because reading is halfway between life and dreaming, our own consciousness in someone else's mind.”

“Every story has already been told. Once you've read Anna Karenina, Bleak House, The Sound and the Fury, To Kill a Mockingbird and A Wrinkle in Time, you understand that there is really no reason to...”

“It seems to me that since I've had children, I've grown richer and deeper. They may have slowed down my writing for a while, but when I did write, I had more of a self to speak from.”

“It didn't matter that there was a war on our doorstep. She had things to do, places to be.”

“Stranger inside me, when you are born, I will give youa closed book and ask you never to read it, never rest, never forgive a man who wants to save you.”