"Some children were lucky enough to have their Potter novels banned by witch-hunting school boards and micromanaging ministers. Is there any greater job than a book you're not allowed to read, a book you could go to hell for reading?"

"A culture fixated on female thinness is not an obsession about female beauty, but an obsession about female obedience. Dieting is the most potent political sedative in women’s history; a quietly mad population is a tractable one."

"What’s the old saying? Ah, I remember now. ‘Curiosity flayed the cat alive, ripped it apart limb from limb, and listened to it scream before it killed it.’ That’s the one."

"Character is beyond obligation. You could kick your shoes off at the door, flick your cigarete butts onto the sidewalk or talk only in slang, those things are forgivable if you have character."

"What sort of world might it have been if Eve had refused the Serpents offer and had said to him instead, 'Let me not be like God. Let me be what I was made to be -- let me be a woman?"

"Imagination is not only the uniquely human capacity to envision that which is not, and therefore the fount of all invention and innovation. In its arguably most transformative and revelatory capacity, it is the power to that enables us to empathize with humans whose experiences we have never shared."