Fashion is what seems beautiful now but looks ugly later; art can be ugly at first but it becomes beautiful later.

- Mona Simpson

We come into the world whole, all of us, but we don't know that, don't know that life will be taking large chunks out of us, forever.

- Mona Simpson

Even as a feminist, my whole life I'd been waiting for a man to love, who could love me. For decades, I'd thought that man would be my father. When I…

- Mona Simpson

We all - in the end - die in medias res. In the middle of a story. Of many stories.

- Mona Simpson

So many things that seemed crucial and excruciatingly hard ended and then didn't matter anymore, forever after

- Mona Simpson

Everybody in America grew up without a father even if they had one. It was the fifties. They were working.

- Mona Simpson

Reading-not occasionally, not only on vacation but everyday-gives me nourishment and enlarges my life in mysterious and essential ways.

- Mona Simpson

Once upon a time, my mother lived in the posh downtown of Homs, Syria. She described my grandfather as a king in a storybook, atop a horse, wearing a…

- Mona Simpson

Love ruined people's lives, the way our parents said drugs could.

- Mona Simpson