The difference between government and leadership is that leadership has a soul.

It makes me angry to think that . . . female sanitation workers will spend their days doing a job most of their co-workers think they can't handle, and then they will go home and do another job most of their co-workers don't want.

Well, we tell our kids things like 'don't gossip' and then an hour later they hear us on the phone. Stuff like that.

And a great misunderstanding is that children think their parents are grown-up, and parents feel obliged to act as if they were.

It's so much easier to write a resume than to craft a spirit.

Grief remains one of the few things that has the power to silence us. It is a whisper in the world and a clamor within. More than sex, more than faith, even more than its usher death, grief is unspoken, publicly ignored except for those moments at the funeral that are over too quickly, or the conversations among the cognoscenti, those of us who recognize in one another a kindred chasm deep in the center of who we are.

A writer is always working with whatever she's managed to store in the brainpan or puzzle out about the world.