Quotes from Lisa Belkin

Corporate identity specialists spend their time rechristening other companies, conducting a legal search and a linguistic search to insure that the name is not an insult in another language.

Until that night Lucille had believed that people say things in anger that they do not really mean. By the time the fracas in her dining room had ended, however, she had come to believe that what people say in anger is what they really do mean, but usually have the self-control to keep to themselves.

Courage' isn't the kinds of word you use to describe yourself, Nick, even if we both know it's true. That only works if other people are saying it.

Courage' isn't the kind of word you use to describe yourself, Nick, even if we both know it's true. That only works if other people are saying it.

There is nothing more nerve-wracking than being inches from a lifelong goal.

The real power—the power to hire, fire, and spend money—still lay mostly with the city manager, except that he was appointed by, and could therefore be dismissed by, the members of the City Council. The end result was that no one was ever really in charge in Yonkers.

Her cooking was terrible, her English minimal, and so their Sabbath dinner conversation was mostly her gesturing toward seconds of overdone meat and underdone potatoes while he pantomimed being full. Every so often she got up to yell at the cat in Yiddish.

Work is the vessel into which we pour so much of ourselves hope and disappointment, elation and rage, satisfaction and frustration. Yet any damp display of these emotions is seen as weakness.