...You won't even see what is put right on the table before you. Men. If it was raining soup you'd be out there with a fork.

To be part of a family, or any community, is to have duties and responsibility, to be bound by the rules of that group.

We were both smiling, in that bittersweet way one does when imagining something the heart longs for and the head would dread.

Strange, how being left out of a secret always feels like a betrayal of trust.

His absence seemed a solid thing, a burden I must carry in addition to my grief... Yet I knew I would continue to live. Sometimes that knowledge seemed the worst part of my loss.

...some secrets beg to be betrayed. The secret of undeclared love is like that.

Still I promise myself, "Next time I will do better" in the all-too-human conceit that I will always be offered a "next time.

There are few things so tender as a man's dignity.

I could have happily moved in and left my own cold, dark house behind, pretended as if this family were my own: loud and teasing and good-natured, instead of the fractured broken truth.

In the non-material scenario, both temple or total quality gets raised, deploying communication as mortar, culture as reinforcement, and commitment as concrete.

There is an instinctive withdrawal for the sake of preservation, a closure that assumes the order of completion. Winter is a season unto itself.

You know, I did not like being famous. It was a stressful and ugly time, and I'm glad it's over.

If the NRA keeps messing with the President's daughters, they're going to have to start worrying about Michelle Obama's guns.

There are, I sometimes think, only two sorts of people in this world - the settled and the nomad - and there is a natural antipathy between them, whatever the land to which they may belong.

And then it gets so hot that they keep the supermarkets too cold. Hot, cold. Hot, cold. It gives me the runs." Mr. Landowsky

In a nuclear age, each of us is threatened when peace is not secured everywhere.

I'd rather have the market tell us what - I'd rather have events precipitate events, rather than just sit there like passive people in Washington.

Science can tell us what exists; but to compare the worths, both of what exists and of what does not exist, we must consult not science, but what Pascal calls our heart.