“The new world will not be neat, and you will have to live with that.”

“Biologists have a label for the neat tricks that enable living things to take care of the four Fs of survival—feeding, fighting, flight, and… reproducing. The label for these traits is "adaptation."”

“Just once I want it to be easy and neat. But no, there is never a good decision. I pick what I can live with.”

“This is the world you have made yourself, now you have to live in it.”

“For once, you're going to hear something that doesn't fit into your neat, compartmentalized world of order and logic and reason.”

“Heaven preserve me from littleness and pleasantness and smoothness. Give me great glaring vices, and great glaring virtues, but preserve me from the neat little neutral ambiguities. Be wicked, be brave, be drunk, be reckless, be dissolute, be despotic, be a suffragette, be anything you like, but for pity's sake be it to the top of your bent. Live fully, live passionately, live disastrously. Let's live, you and I, as none have ever lived before.”

“You don't have to be born in New York City to be a New Yorker. You have to live here for six months. And if at the end of the six months you walk faster, you talk faster, you think faster, you're a New Yorker.”

“The books transported her into new worlds and introduced her to amazing people who lived exciting lives.”

“Once you have lived in New York and made it your home, no place else is good enough”

“What's wrong with living in a dream world? You have to wake up.”