As always, an educated woman was a dangerous woman.

parenting is an exercise in unintended consequences.

A rich, multi-dimensional tour of Naples, most brilliant, battered, and bewildering of cities, here fixed to the page with wit and élan. Splendid.

I'm a sucker for lost worlds. I was nostalgic even as a child. I was happiest in my hometown library in Adams, Mass., where nothing seemed to change.

When a woman teams up with a snake a moral storm threatens somewhere.

And in the absence of facts, myth rushes in, the kudzu of history.

An interesting thing about book groups, it seems to me, is that there is no correlation between a brilliant book and a brilliant discussion. The first seems sometimes even to undermine the second.

Motherhood is always an act of courage.

My next book is on the Salem witch trials. As a small-town Massachusetts girl, this makes me very happy. So does the reunion with documents!

No one in the modern world controls the wealth or territory that Cleopatra did.

Ancient history is oddly short on incorrect omens.

Dance is the language of artistic kinesis.

So prodigal was I of youth Forgetting I was young I worshipped dead men for their strength Forgetting I was strong.

How can I be in two places at once, unless I were a bird?

All men are homosexual, some turn straight. It must be very odd to be a straight man because your sexuality is hopelessly defensive. It's like an ideal of racial purity.

In any insurgency there will be people who are irreconcilable and who pose a clear and present threat to the U.S. and our allies.

We dull our lives by the way we conceive them.

I know our kids will be OK, as long as they listen more to their mother than to me!

You use simple brushstrokes in a screenplay for things over which you would take much greater pains in a novel.

It is false to say that humanity is the most excellent being in the universe. The most excellent being in the universe is the universe itself.

I'm always relearning things I thought I'd learned for good a while back.