Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
Money can be detrimental for kids.
We all have complexity in our lives.
At Harvard, I majored in English Literature.
To talk of food is to talk of mothers, at least for me.
By the time I was seven, my mother and I had moved 13 times.
You can have a value system and be unable to totally live it.
Sometimes it's nice of someone to tell you what you smell like.
I don't like catching myself in the mirror because it's like, 'Oh, self.'
Prosciutto should be thin and let light through like stained glass. Even I know that.
It's not a fun thing to be the person set up in opposition to the work everyone loves.
I tried to find a social niche at Harvard - a group, my group - but I was unsuccessful.
Sometimes, if I felt badly about myself, I could slyly pull out that I have this famous father.
The social scene at the Harvard I knew was outside the rules of literature. It was less poignant.
Italy was where the soul went to find calm and love, and I wanted to hold the best of it in the palm of my hand.
Until I was two, my mother supplemented her welfare payments by cleaning houses and waitressing. My father didn't help.
In literature there was always an epiphany - a tingling moment, sometimes buried - the pearl around which the whole work formed.
When I was growing up in California, being vegetarians differentiated my mother and me from normal, held us away from the masses.
In California, my mother had raised me mostly alone. We didn't have many things, but she is warm, and we were happy. We moved a lot. We rented.
My father was rich and renowned, and later - as I got to know him, went on vacations with him, and then lived with him for a few years - I saw another, more glamorous world.
In the spring of 1978, when my parents were 23, my mother gave birth to me on their friend Robert's farm in Oregon with the help of two midwives. The labor and delivery took three hours, start to finish.
When I was in elementary school, I watched 'Cinema Paradiso' 22 times and memorized the dialogue. In the movie, everyone had a place, even the bum who thought he owned the piazza. Eccentricities were celebrated, and no one was isolated.
I didn't have the clothes that a kid with a famous, rich dad would have. I didn't have the house. I didn't have the mannerisms. I didn't have the sense of entitlement. And I don't mean that in a bad way: I just - we didn't have the stuff.
I see my husband and the way he is with his daughters, responsive and alive and sensitive in ways my father would have liked to be. My father would have loved to be a man like that, and he surrounded himself with men like that, but he couldn't be.
I know that organic farms can be industrial and just as large and impersonal as conventional farms. Sometimes the free-range chickens aren't even allowed outside, and so they cluck-walk packed tight in a dim lit barn. But organic farms use fewer chemicals.
Three months before he died, I began to steal things from my father's house. I wandered around barefoot and slipped objects into my pockets. I took blush, toothpaste, two chipped finger bowls in celadon blue, a bottle of nail polish, a pair of worn patent-leather ballet slippers, and four faded white pillowcases the color of old teeth.