“Before I met my husband, I’d never fallen in love, though I’d stepped in it a few times.”

“Perhaps, after all, America never has been discovered. I myself would say that it had merely been detected.”

“The beginning of knowledge is the discovery of something we do not understand.”

“Everyone is as God has made him, and oftentimes a great deal worse.”

“Anyone who has gumption knows what it is, and anyone who hasn’t can never know what it is. So there is no need of defining it.”

“What is most beautiful in virile men is something feminine; what is most beautiful in feminine women is something masculine.”

“You’ve got your phenomenon on one hand. Concrete and knowable. On the other hand you’ve got the incomprehensible. You call it God, but to me, God or no, it remains just that, the unknowable.”

“You can?t love a crowd the same way you can love a person./ And a crowd can?t love you the way a single person can love you./ Intimacy doesn?t scale. Not really. Intimacy is a one-on-one phenomenon.”

Two possibilities exist: Either we are alone in the Universe or we are not. Both are equally terrifying.

Never tell a story because it is true: tell it because it is a good story.