We almost manage to forget that things happen that we don't anticipate.

That is supposed to be the rallying cry of women in the age of AIDS: no condom, no sex. But the dirty little secret is that the rallying cry is a whisper.... The great unspoken on the heterosexual AIDS front has been how behavior is still determined by the old psychosexual minuet of the sexes, the lack of responsibility in young men and of assertiveness in young women.

Women who marry early are often overly enamored of the kind of man who looks great in wedding pictures and passes the maid of honor his telephone number.

I think the gift of my mother's death, if anything so terrible can be said to have an upside to it, is that I was always keenly aware that life was fleeting, and that you'd better live while you have the chance. As I say in the book, since I was 19 years old I felt like I was living for two, and when I out-lived my mother, when I got into my forties, it felt like a miracle to me.

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

Reporters are not paid to operate in retrospect. Because when news begins to solidify into current events and finally harden intohistory, it is the stories we didn't write, the questions we didn't ask that prove far, far more damaging than the ones we did.

A life of unremitting caution, without the carefree - or even, occasionally, the careless - may turn out to be half a life.