Children should have enough freedom to be themselves - once they've learned the rules.

There's something undeniable about the posture of a person trying not to acknowledge your existance

[President Johnson] had the political will to say that having one in five Americans living in the kind of abject conditions their fellow citizens associated with Third World countries and the novels of Dickens was as dangerous as any battlefield enemy.

The pursuit of otherness, the sense that we are somehow different than our brothers and sisters, no matter where we find them, allows for all the other great evils: racism, sexism, homophobia, violence against gay people and against women.

Grief remains one of the few things that has the power to silence us.

Life is so messy that the temptation to straighten it up is very strong. And the results always illusory.

In the family sandwich, the older people and the younger ones can recognize one another as the bread. Those in the middle are, for a time, the meat.