"I'm Chinese-American, of course, and so it's very interesting to see China actually launch their own astronauts, becoming the third nation, following the United States and Russia, to do so."

"All the accounts of the burial of Jesus are somber, laced through with the silence of grief, the shock that violence does to one's soul, even experienced vicariously in the body of another who is loved. They are written as though they are dirges, laments hidden in the silences and spaces between the words."

"If there is such a thing as depression and despair, I experienced it during the months leading-up to and following the divorce. Insomnia, constant and uncontrollable thoughts and a deep sense of loss were among the conditions of my life. Was I depressed? Yes, I was very much so and, what’s worse, was determined to do nothing immediately for it."

"This very act of consenting to its loss of control is itself the critical event of all crisis. To give up ones stature as the director of ones own existance: this is, for us, the ultimate death, the crisis that undermines our being in the most radical way."

"Follow your dreams Bailey. Be they Harvard or somehing else entirely. No matter what that father of yours says, or how loudly he might say it. He forgets that he was someone's dream once, himself."

"Somehow however just knowing that I could fully expect unhappiness to return – if not predictably then nevertheless reliably – was strangely liberating. The point was that even chaos had a structure a beginning and eventually an end. It was possible to live through it. I’d been doing as much for twenty years."

"I don't necessarily start with the beginning of the book. I just start with the part of the story that's most vivid in my imagination and work forward and backward from there."

"It was only later, replaying the scene in her mind again and again, that she began to believe it was the expression of a man who was methodically unplugging himself from reality, one cord at a time. The face of a man who was heading out of the blue and into the black."

"If you take guns away from legal gun owners, then the only people who would have guns would be the bad guys. Even a pacifist would get violent if someone were trying to kill him or her. You would fight for your life, whatever your beliefs."

"I am like the water that runs over me, immune to permanence, recycling endlessly. I am water; I am life. The form may change, but the substance stays the same. Strike me down and I will rise again. Vincit qui patitur."

"How Horrid' has a slightly facetious tone that strikes me as Wildean. It appears to embrace the actual horror--puberty, public disgrace--then at the last second nimbly sidesteps it, laughing."