“I also have a feeling your mother’s going to have a very ugly conversation with me." – Dimitri”

“I love movies that don’t necessarily tell me how I should feel or how I should think but give me this canvas that I can go away and have a conversation with myself and people around me.”

“It’s true that I wouldn’t have written the first book had my sister and mother been alive. It was my way of continuing our conversation. It’s also this Jewish thing of naming and remembering people, and I think there is a sense of keeping that side of life going.”

“Do you know how an ugly woman feels? Do you know what it is to be ugly all your life and inside to feel that you are beautiful? It is very rare.”

“I'm very, very blessed. But my safety, my privacy, and my respect are three things that I feel like are trying to be taken away from me right now. As a mother I have to speak up and say something. I have to speak up.”

“I have tried… believe me, I have tried to like rap music. It makes me feel so very, very old. I have tried to get home with the downies.”

“Anthony sneezed and pushed them aside. "Mother, I am trying to have a conversation with the duke."

Violet looked at Simon. "Do you want to have this conversation with my son?"

"Not particularly."

"Fine, then. Anthony, be quiet.”

“e as you, but he couldn’t see me, because I was dark and Indian-looking and didn’t have blue eyes like him. Your mother and me, we are not going to forget you and your sisters like my father forgot me. I swear it!”

“Mother Mother Ocean, I have heard your call.”

“Sometimes, I genuinely enjoy having conversations with journalists; enjoying the few moments of intimacy with a stranger is fascinating to me. But once in a while that backfires and you're suddenly reading something that has a bent on it that you didn't feel was in the least bit a part of the conversation that you thought you were having. Then you get overly protective and say very little and then you come out of the hole again.”