“Believe in yourself, listen to your gut, and do what you love.”

“Computers intimidate me.”

“I love all the gift guides that the magazines put out, whether it's 'InStyle' doing Mother's Day gifts or color guides, or the 'O' magazine Christmas guide.”

“I have a vanilla chai latte every morning, which I usually follow with an oatmeal raisin cookie and eggs for breakfast.”

“People get emails from me at 3 in the morning.”

“Every two months, I allow myself a splurge day where I eat thick, doughy pizza from Pizzeria Uno or an ice cream sundae from my store with birthday-cake ice cream, Marshmallow Fluff, and toppings m...”

“I see them standing at the formal gates of their colleges,I see my father strolling outunder the ochre sandstone arch, thered tiles glinting like bentplates of blood behind his head, Isee my mother...”

“We realized that the version of the world they rendered for us was not the world they really believed in...”

“Id never heard my parents make love. If they made love, they did it silently, like bank robbers, like surgeons.”

“I like indoor Christmas trees. And I like people who decorate their homes with lights and all that crap. I think it's a healthy outlet for them. If they weren't covering their lawns with twinkling ...”

“I'm still a Chicagoan in the fact that I can't do Christmas with sand and palm trees. It just doesn't compute - it's not Christmas unless your face hurts when you step outside.”

“Being half Jewish, we grew up with Christmas trees but had Jewish ornaments.”

“People are like M&Ms. They come in a variety of colors, they're hard on the outside, and full of obscene yumminess on the inside.”

“Knowledge was like candy: you never turned it down, especially if you didn't have to work too hard to get it.”

“She grinned, looking for all the world like a sticky-mouthed little girl who had just convinced her gullible mother that she really did drop the first piece of candy into the storm drain and would ...”