“Typically, middle-class educated parents' search for their children's schools takes on the feel, if not of teen girls trying on different outfits, of adolescents trying on various selves.”

“The literature of menopause is the saddest, the most awful, and the most medical of all genres. You're sleepless, you're anxious, you're fat, you're depressed - and the advice is always the same: t...”

“There's an image that some of us have of Jackie Onassis, stepping out in the rain, and Maurice Tempelsman is holding her umbrella. We want that man. We want the man to be the concierge and the mass...”

“You go into the book store, there's the cut-out of Dr. Phil, and then the dreaded women's health section where every book, instead of the menopause book with the fanged Medusa head on the cover tha...”

“Just because marriage didn't work for us doesn't mean we don't believe in the institution. Just because our own marital track records are mixed doesn't mean our hearts don't lift at the sight of ou...”

“Some of us stay married because we're in competition with our divorcing 1960s and 1970s parents, who made such a hash of it. What looks appealing to us now, in an increasingly frenetic, digital wor...”

“They had killed themselves over our dying forests, over manatees maimed by propellers as they surfaced to drink from garden hoses; they had killed themselves at the sight of used tires stacked high...”

“The world seemed to shimmer a little at the edges.”

“If we cannot accept the importance of the world, which considers itself important, if in the midst of that world our laughter finds no echo, we have but one choice: to take the world as a whole and...”

“There's a strength in that look, a wilfulness; one would almost call it defiance except that it is so good-humoured. It is the look a woman would wear - would have worn - if she asked a man, a stra...”

“If its reality you want, I suggest you look out the window.”

“Reality is how you look at it”

“The misery in war-torn Afghanistan is reminiscent of images from the Thirty Years' War.”

“When I was five years old, I auditioned for the role of 'Tiny Tim in A Christmas Carol.'”

“Yeah, I spent my teen years in West Virginia, and when I was a kid, in Louisiana. I definitely have that exposure to two different sorts of rural: the South and Appalachia.”