Lisa Brennan-Jobs

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“It's not a fun thing to be the person set up in opposition to the work everyone loves.”

“At Harvard, I majored in English Literature.”

“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.”

“Until I was two, my mother supplemented her welfare payments by cleaning houses and waitressing. My father didn't help.”

“Looking at font serifs is fun.”

“When I was growing up in California, being vegetarians differentiated my mother and me from normal, held us away from the masses.”

“The social scene at the Harvard I knew was outside the rules of literature. It was less poignant.”