"If the Lord hasn't got a boyfriend lined up for me to marry, that's his business."

"I had decided early on that if I couldn’t dress elegant, I’d dress memorable."

"Sadness is more or less like a head cold - with patience, it passes. Depression is like cancer."

"Cooking"Cooking is 80"Cooking is 80 percent confidence, a skill best acquired starting from when the apron strings wrap around you twice." percent confidence, a skill best acquired starting from when the apron strings wrap around you twice." is 80 percent confidence, a skill best acquired starting from when the apron strings wrap around you twice."

"Oh, mercy. If it catches you in the wrong frame of mind, the King James Bible can make you want to drink poison in no uncertain terms."

"...I stir in bed and the memories rise out of me like a buzz of flies from a carcass. I crave to be rid of them..."

"Love weighs nothing."

"I've about decided that's the main thing that separates happy people from the other people: the feeling that you're a practical item, with a use, like a sweater or a socket wrench."

"Last time I talked to her she didn't sound like herself. She's depressed. It's awful what happens when people run out of money. They start thinking they're no good."

"I'm of a fearsome mind to throw my arms around every living librarian who crosses my path, on behalf of the souls they never knew they saved."

"The death of something living is the price of our own survival, and we pay it again and again. We have no choice. It is the one solemn promise every life on earth is born and bound to keep."

"If you want sweet dreams, you've got to live a sweet life."

"Thanks for this day, for all birds safe in their nests, for whatever this is, for life."

"Morning always comes."

"There's more pressure on women to be chirpy and perky."

"As anyone knows who has ever had to set up a military encampment or build a village from the ground up, occupations pose staggering logistical problems."

"The urge to transform one's appearance, to dance outdoors, to mock the powerful and embrace perfect strangers is not easy to suppress." --Barbara Ehrenreich, Dancing in the Streets, 260."

"When you watch television, you never see people watching television. We love television because it brings us a world in which television does not exist."

"Poverty is not a character failing or a lack of motivation. Poverty is a shortage of money."

"Marriage is socialism among two people."

"I'm not a nice person."

"What you don't necessarily realize when you start selling your time by the hour is that what you're actually selling is your life."

"Personally, I can't see why it would be any less romantic to find a husband in a nice four-color catalogue than in the average downtown bar at happy hour."

"The 'working poor,' as they are approvingly termed, are in fact the major philanthropists of our society."