“Never pray for justice, because you might get some.”

“What is it the I'll want from you? Not love: that would be too much to ask. Not forgiveness, which isn't yours to bestow. Only a listener, perhaps; only someone who will see me. Don't prettify me though, whatever else you do: I have no wish to be a decorated skull.

“If I love you, is that a fact or a weapon?”

“To want is to have a weakness.”

“That was when they suspended the Constitution. They said it would be temporary. There wasn't even any rioting in the streets. People stayed home at night, watching television, looking for some direction. There wasn't even an enemy you could put your finger on.”

“Should is a futile word. It's about what didn't happen. It belongs in a parallel universe. It belongs in another dimension of space.”

“Vanity is becoming a nuisance, I can see why women give it up, eventually. But I'm not ready for that yet.”

“And yet it disturbs me to learn I have hurt someone unintentionally. I want all my hurts to be intentional.”

“It isn't running away they're afraid of. We wouldn't get far. It's those other escapes, the ones you can open in yourself, given a cutting edge.”

“In the end, we'll all become stories.”

“What we share may be a lot like a traffic accident but we get one another. We are survivors of each other. We have been shark to one another, but also lifeboat. That counts for something.”

“They spent the first three years of school getting you to pretend stuff and then the rest of it marking you down if you did the same thing.”

“Nature is to zoos as God is to churches.”

“Why is it we want so badly to memorialize ourselves? Even while we're still alive. We wish to assert our existence, like dogs peeing on fire hydrants.”

“Every habit he's ever had is still there in his body, lying dormant like flowers in the desert. Given the right conditions, all his old addictions would burst into full and luxuriant bloom.”

“Happy as a clam, is what my mother says for happy. I am happy as a clam: hard-shelled, firmly closed.”

“Home is where the heart is, I thought now, gathering myself together in Betty's Luncheonette. I had no heart any more, it had been broken; or not broken, it simply wasn't there any more. It had been scooped neatly out of me like the yolk from a hard-boiled egg, leaving the rest of me bloodless and congealed and hollow.

“Old lovers go the way of old photographs, bleaching out gradually as in a slow bath of acid: first the moles and pimples, then the shadings. Then the faces themselves, until nothing remains but the general outlines.”

“What fabrications they are, mothers. Scarecrows, wax dolls for us to stick pins into, crude diagrams. We deny them an existence of their own, we make them up to suit ourselves -- our own hungers, our own wishes, our own deficiencies.”

“This is what I miss, Cordelia: not something that’s gone, but something that will never happen. Two old women giggling over their tea.”

“For if the world treats you well, Sir, you come to believe you are deserving of it.”

“Why does the mind do such things? Turn on us, rend us, dig the claws in. If you get hungry enough, they say, you start eating your own heart. Maybe it's much the same.”

“After everything that's happened, how can the world still be so beautiful? Because it is.”

“Murderess is a strong word to have attached to you. It has a smell to it, that word - musky and oppressive, like dead flowers in a vase. Sometimes at night I whisper it over to myself: Murderess, Murderess. It rustles, like a taffeta skirt across the floor.”

“They wore blouses with buttons down the front that suggested the possibilities of the word undone. These women could be undone; or not. They seemed to be able to choose. ”

“As all historians know, the past is a great darkness, and filled with echoes.”

“I feel like cotton candy: sugar and air. Squeeze me and I’d turn into a small sickly damp wad of weeping pinky-red.”

“Modesty is invisibility...Never forget it. To be seen—to be seen—is to be...penetrated. What you must be girls, is impenetrable.”

“Cleverness is a quality a man likes to have in his wife as long as she is some distance away from him. Up close, he'll take kindness any day of the week, if there's nothing more alluring to be had.”

“We lived, as usual by ignoring. Ignoring isn't the same as ignorance, you have to work at it.”

“My better is better than your better.”

“The only one who can tell you ‘you can’t’ is you. And you don’t have to listen.”

“If no one thinks you can then you have to.”

“My agility denies your agility.”

“Failure’s not an option. It’s a step.”

“Yesterday you said tomorrow.”

“Rewrite history. Redefine the position.”

“Be legendary.”

“Run the day. Don’t let it run you.”

“I believe in redefining my impossible.”

“Impossible is just a big word thrown around by small men who find it easier to the world they’ve been given than to explore the power they have to change it. Impossible is not a fact. It’s an opinion. Impossible is not a declaration. It’s a dare. Impossible is potential. Impossible is temporary.”

“Every professional was once an amateur.”

“Somehow we’ve come to believe that greatness is only for the chosen few, for the superstars. The truth is, greatness is for us all. This is not about lowering expectations; it’s about raising them for every last one of us. Greatness is not in one special place, and it’s not in one special person. Greatness is wherever somebody is trying to find it. Find your greatness.”

“Willpower knows no obstacles. Find your greatness.”

“Start unknown. Finish unforgettable.”

“Test your faith daily.”

“The ones who say ‘you can’t’ are too afraid you will.

“Make yourself unstoppable.”

“You can feel sore tomorrow or you can feel sorry tomorrow. You choose.”

“You’re only one workout away from a good mood.”