Quotes from Lisa Brennan-Jobs

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.

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 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.

Sometimes, if I felt badly about myself, I could slyly pull out that I have this famous father.

In literature there was always an epiphany - a tingling moment, sometimes buried - the pearl around which the whole work formed.

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.

By the time I was seven, my mother and I had moved 13 times.

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

We all have complexity in our lives.

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.

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

Money can be detrimental for kids.

Prosciutto should be thin and let light through like stained glass. Even I know that.

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.

At Harvard, I majored in English Literature.

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

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.

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.'

To talk of food is to talk of mothers, at least for me.

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.

I tried to find a social niche at Harvard - a group, my group - but I was unsuccessful.

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.

You can have a value system and be unable to totally live it.