"Chicago is stupefying. It knows no rules, and I know none by which to judge it. It stands apart from all the cities in the world, isolated by its own individuality, an Olympian freak, a fable, an allegory, an incomprehensible phenomenon, a prodigious paradox in which youth and maturity, brute strength and soaring spirit, are harmoniously confused.Call Chicago mighty, monstrous, multifarious, vital, lusty, stupendous, indomitable, intense, unnatural, aspiring, puissant, preposterous, transcendent—call it what you like—throw the dictionary at it!"

"It was a Native Son who, when asked by an Englishman, visiting the United States for the first time, to name the Seven Wonders of America, replied: "Santa Barbara, Coronado, Del Monte, San Francisco, Yosemite, Lake Tahoe and Mount Shasta.""But," objected the visitor, "all those places are in California, aren't they?""Of course they're in California!" cried the Native Son. "Where else would they be?""

"Kansas used to believe in Populism and free silver. It now believes in hot summers and a hot hereafter."

"For we Americans, though we are the most restless race in the world, with the possible exception of the Bedouins, almost never permit ourselves to travel, either at home, or abroad, as the "guests of Chance." We always go from one place to another with a definite purpose. We never amble. On the boat, going to Europe, we talk of leisurely trips away from the "beaten track," but we never take them. After we land we rush about obsessed by "sights," seeing with the eyes of guides and thinking the "canned" thoughts of guidebooks."

"Like so many things, it all started with a small obsession. When I was only seven or eight, I used to lie in my comfortable old German bed at night, in every respect a most loved and blessed child, and think about it. What, I would wonder for reasons I have never totally understood, if only one person had the truth and that person was a woman? She would not voice it because the women I knew did not speak out, and so the world would be denied this crucial truth."

"… her travels … became more frequent after she left the in 1974 to become a Washington-based syndicated columnist, with her work carried in more than 120 newspapers. She boldly ventured into many dangerous climes and into face-to-face encounters not only with Castro and a number of U.S. presidents, but also with such world leaders as Argentina’s , Libya’s Moammar Gadhafi, Yasser Arafat and, in the first interview he granted to a Western journalist, Saddam Hussein when he was Iraq’s vice president in 1973."

"Israeli officials will tell you privately that "If the Arabs were ever to win, we would use the atom bomb.""

"One of the things my editor and I did fight about…is the idea of how much a reader can take. To me you get nowhere second guessing how much can a reader stand and how much can she not. What a reader can always tell is when you are holding back for fear of offending them. I wanted there to be something too much about the violence in the book, but I also wanted there to be an exaggeration of everything, an exaggeration of love, of empathy, of pity, of horror. I wanted everything turned up a little too high…"

"In some ways. I do want to do something very different with each book…I think this book is linked to the first but approaches it in a completely different way. The first book was much chillier, more remote. And intentionally so. I don’t think it was a book that anyone loved and I didn’t love it either. It was not a book that was meant to inspire love in the way that I think this one is."

"…I know plenty of people who have been at the helm of various creative galleries, or production companies, and have never felt the need to behave poorly. It’s just a lazy justification. And as someone who has managed to go 25 years without conflating sex with power, or bullying my colleagues, I find it particularly offensive."

"Part of this book is an homage to the way my friends and I live: lives without children, without marriage, lives you rarely see depicted in popular art, unless as a punch line or a tragedy, lives not considered by many to be full, legitimate adulthood. And yet when I was growing up, my parents always had a diversity of friends, some of whom lived different kinds of lives themselves…And they had many friends who had chosen this other path of adulthood, who weren’t married, who didn’t have children, whose lives didn’t resemble their own. So this sort of life never seemed like anything less-than to me. The loneliness of living the life I do comes from the fact that so many people do think it’s a lesser existence, a purgatory of true adulthood."

"Free choice is a very precious thing."

"I have deliberately chosen the uncertain path whenever I had the chance."

"Nobody said not to go."

"The mind of a traveler has only one spotlight, and it is always trained on the present scene."

"With my usual sublime self-confidence, I rode roughshod over the objections."

"O golden Silence, bid our souls be still, And on the foolish fretting of our care Lay thy soft touch of healing unaware!"

"Come, blessed Darkness, come and bring thy balm For eyes grown weary of the garish day! Come with thy soft, slow steps, thy garments gray, Thy veiling shadows, bearing in thy palm The poppy-seeds of slumber, deep and calm."

"What dost thou bring to me, O fair To-day, That comest o'er the mountains with swift feet?"

"Aspirations pure and high — Strength to do and to endure — Heir of all the Ages, I — Lo! I am no longer poor!"