“I was firmly in the out-of-sight-out-of-mind camp, and had cogent, unflinchingly honest declarations I frequently made about losing a shared context, and sentimentalism, and the general faint heart...”

“How can it be, after all this concentrated effort and separation, how can it be that I still resemble, so very closely, my own detestable mother?”

“My parents seemed incredibly special and outrageously handsome to me then.”

“every session I had no fewer than sixteen girls with allergies to dairy and wheatcheese and bread basicallybut also to garlic, eggplant, corn, and nuts. They had cleverly developed allergies, I bel...”

“This is the crepe. This is the cider. This is how we live and eat.”

“I am often slow in catching up to the times, but even so, I still cannot even grip this idea: With nothing more than pitocin in your IV drip, you can sooner control the date and time of the birth o...”

“Creating a life that reflects your values and satisfies your soul is a rare achievement. In a culture that relentlessly promotes avarice and excess as the good life, a person happy doing his own wo...”

“I'm a heart surgeon, sure, but I'm just a mechanic. I go in and I fuck around and I fix things. Shit.”

“Cat, I'll let you in on a little secret. We don't all love our jobs every day. And doing something you have passion for doesn't make the work part of it any easier...It just makes you less likely t...”

“Hide not your talents, they for use were made,What's a sundial in the shade?”

“The person born with a talent they are meant to use will find their greatest happiness in using it. ”

“Talent is extremely common. What is rare is the willingness to endure the life of the writer.”