Whether talking about addiction, taxation [on cigarettes] or education [about smoking], there is always at the center of the conversation an essential conundrum: How come we're selling this deadly stuff anyway?

People always blame the girl; she should have said no. A monosyllable, but conventional wisdom has always been that boys can't manage it.

Don't ever forget the words on a postcard that my father sent me last year: "If you win the rat race, you're still a rat.

All the things we don’t say, all the words we swallow, and it makes nothing but trouble.

My father really, really pushed me to excel in a way that I resented for years and then realized had really worked for me.

I'm not making light of prayers here, but of so-called school prayer, which bears as much resemblance to real spiritual experienceas that freeze-dried astronaut food bears to a nice standing rib roast. From what I remember of praying in school, it was almost an insult to God, a rote exercise in moving your mouth while daydreaming or checking out the cutest boy in the seventh grade that was a far, far cry from soul-searching.

There are those of us who believe that under certain conditions the cruelest thing you can do to people you love is to force them to live. There are those of us who define living not by whether the heart beats and the lungs lift but whether the spirit is there, whether the music box plays.