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!

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.

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.

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

Ancient history is oddly short on incorrect omens.

I finally understood what my grandmother meant. If I wasn't comfortable with myself, I would never be comfortable.

[In the 1960s]...you could take LSD but you couldn't wear a pantsuit.

The next big invention that will change the way we live should be things like ways of generating energy like electricity.

What is so marvelous about living today is that it is possible to extend, like a flower, spreading petals in all directions.

Hope, like faith, is a principle of action. It motivates and inspires. We do not sit in our armchairs and hope for hope; we get up and go to work.

Of course, I have Gene Roddenberry to thank for the creation of Barclay.

religion and morality are a much better whip to keep people in submission than even the club and the gun.

We cannot break God's laws - but we can break ourselves against them.

As long as you find something beautiful, good, and true to believe in and abide by, you have the equivalent of God in your life.

Here Eddie, hold the flag while I putt out.