Above all, be the heroine of your life, not the victim.

What are you going to do? Everything, is my guess. It will be a little messy, but embrace the mess. It will be complicated, but rejoice in the complications.

Don't you love New York in the fall? It makes me want to buy school supplies. I would send you a bouquet of newly sharpened pencils if I knew your name and address.

When I buy a new book, I always read the last page first, that way in case I die before I finish, I know how it ends. That, my friend, is a dark side.

Insane people are always sure that they are fine. It is only the sane people who are willing to admit that they are crazy.

The desire to get married is a basic and primal instinct in women. It's followed by another basic and primal instinct: the desire to be single again.

And then the dreams break into a million tiny pieces. The dream dies. Which leaves you with a choice: you can settle for reality, or you can go off, like a fool, and dream another dream.

I have made a lot of mistakes falling in love, and regretted most of them, but never the potatoes that went with them.

When your children are teenagers, it's important to have a dog so that someone in the house is happy to see you.

I don't think any day is worth living without thinking about what you're going to eat next at all times.

I look out the window and I see the lights and the skyline and the people on the street rushing around looking for action, love, and the world's greatest chocolate chip cookie, and my heart does a little dance.

So much of what I see reminds me of something I read in a book, when shouldn't it be the other way around?

Oh, how I regret not having worn a bikini for the entire year I was twenty-six. If anyone young is reading this, go, right this minute, put on a bikini, and don't take it off until you're thirty-four.

My mother wanted us to understand that the tragedies of your life one day have to potential to be the comic stories the next.

[W]hen you realize you want to spend the rest of your life with somebody, you want the rest of your life to start as soon as possible.

Summer bachelors like summer breezes, are never as cool as they pretend to be.

In my sex fantasy, nobody ever loves me for my mind.

Reading makes me feel I've accomplished something, learned something, become a better person. ... Reading is bliss.

I married him against all evidence. I married him believing that marriage doesn't work, that love dies, that passion fades, and in so doing I became the kind of romantic only a cynic is truly capable of being.

…the amount of maintenance involving hair is genuinely overwhelming. Sometimes I think that not having to worry about your hair anymore is the secret upside of death.

I have no desire to be dominated. Honestly I don't. And yet I find myself becoming angry when I'm not.

I always read the last page of a book first so that if I die before I finish I'll know how it turned out.

It's much easier to get over someone if you can delude yourself into thinking you never really cared that much.

You always think that a bolt of lightning is going to strike and your parents will magically change into the people you wish they were, or back into the people they used to be.

I look as young as a person can look given how old I am.

The hardest thing about writing is writing.

Above all, be the heroine of your own life, not the victim.

As Harry puts it, men and women can never be friends because 'the sex part always gets in the way.

If pregnancy were a book they would cut the last two chapters.

When you slip on a banana peel, people laugh at you. But when you tell people you slipped on a banana peel, it's your laugh.

Never marry a man you wouldn’t want to be divorced from.

I'll have what she's having

When you read a book as a child, it becomes a part of your identity in a way that no other reading in your whole life does.

SALLY Harry, I can’t do this anymore. I am not your consolation prize. Goodbye.

The image of the journalist as wallflower at the orgy has been replaced by the journalist as the life of the party.

It was personal to me." ~Kathleen Kelly (Meg Ryan) in You've Got Mail

I can make a case that I regret nothing. After all, most of my mistakes turned out to be things I survived, or turned into funny stories, or, on occasion, even made money from.

He was, in his way, as close to a Zen master as I've ever had, and all of us who fell under his influence began with his style and eventually ended up with our own.

Love is homesickness.

You can never have too much butter.

You'd be amazed how little choice you have about loony bins.

What happens to me when I'm provoked is that I get tongue-tied and my mind goes blank. Then I spend all night tossing and turning trying to figure out what I should have said

Anything you think is wrong with your body at the age of thirty-five you will be nostalgic for at the age of forty-five.

Reading is grist. Reading is bliss.

Well, at least this time I get to be a person in the story. The last time you told one of your Russian parables I was a bag of chickens.

Above all, be the heroine of your life.

I must try this again, I thought; I must try again someday to sit still and not say a word. Maybe when I'm dead.

He loved Thelma, Jonathan said, he had never loved anyone but Thelma, he had loved Thelma for nineteen years and would always love her even though Thelma didn't give a rat's ass about him and never had.

Checked out the mirror to see if I looked older, or sadder, or wiser. I didn’t; I just looked tired.

You fall in love with someone, and part of what you love about him are the differences between you; and then you get married and the differences start to drive you crazy.