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.

parenting is an exercise in unintended consequences.

As always, an educated woman was a dangerous woman.

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

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.

I prefer for things to happen serendipitously, but honestly, I also love terrible pickup lines.

Photography can only represent the present. Once photographed, the subject becomes part of the past.

One of the most ignored dimensions of the Iraqi insurgency are the Iraqis themselves who are regularly abducted, held for ransom and sometimes executed.

I have always been happy. Even if I had been more honest with regard to myself at that moment I should still have written La Nausee.

The commendation of adversaries is the greatest triumph of a writer, because it never comes unless extorted.

In contemplative prayer we seek to become the person we are called to be, not by thinking of God, but by being with God. Simply to be with God is to be drawn into being the person God calls us to be

Talkin', talkin, talkin', talk. Baby, let's just knock it off. They don't know what we been through. They don't know 'bout me and you.

I now understand what Christ suffered in Gethsemane as well as any man living.

I have a 20-year-old son, I have a 12-year-old son and I'm so afraid for them.

I continue to explore poetry.