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

It is so easy to waste our lives: Our days, our hours, our minutes ... it is so easy to exist instead of live.

It's only before realities set in that we can treasure our delusions.

I am an affirmative action hire.

I once wanted to be a personage. Now I am comfortable being a person.

Real friends offer both hard truths and soft landings and realize that it's sometimes more important to be nice than to be honest.

A week in the hospital she had told us. A hysterectomy, she had said. It had seemed unremarkable to me in a woman of forty-six long finished with childbearing, although every day that I grow older I realize there is never anything unremarkable about losing any part of what makes you female - a breast, a womb, a child, a man.