Judith Thurman quotes:

Conservatives like Palin and Reagan and others do seem to love the series, but so do people of all political stripes and backgrounds. I speak about the series' "radiant simplicity."

Long before feminism made fashion a guilty pleasure, my first experience of the sisterhood among strangers took place in a communal dressing room.

Even after several hospitalizations for alcohol and drug-related nervous breakdowns, poet Edna St. Vincent Millay defined sobriety as restricting her daily intake of liquor to a liter and a half of wine.

This is the river of the great 19th-century landscapists; of Cole, Cropsey and Church, and at the end of the summer it lies motionless under the haze as under a light coat of varnish.

A mad person sees what isn't there; A visionary sees what isn't there yet

We have one life to live - and one chance to live it in the richest way possible.

And that may be [Helen Gurley] Brown's most enlightened lesson: that sexual autonomy and fulfillment are inseparable from the autonomy and fulfillment that a woman gets from her career.

Insecurity, however, is a luxury on which I never economize.

Every dreamer knows that it is entirely possible to be homesick for a place you've never been to, perhaps more homesick than for familiar ground.

The border between editing and ghostwriting is, at its extremes, a bit porous. An editor really improves and sometimes restructures a manuscript and suggests changes.

Here was a monument, in fieldstone, to the art of family life.

As for the multiple editions, in the case of a truly great writer - Shakespeare, Emily Dickinson, Proust, someone with a canon - there is often a "variorum" edition of the work that presents its variants. I think publishing most other writing that way would be impossible, economically, for publishers, and very ill-advised for authors.

If you are forced to describe things for someone else, it sharpens your senses. And also your sense of how hard it is to make the translation from the vibrant, multi-faceted world to a sentence that distils it.