The Cairo conferenceis about a complicated web of education and employment, consumption and poverty, development and health care. It is also about whether governments will follow where women have so clearly led them, toward safe, simple and reliable choices in family planning. While Cairo crackles with conflict, in the homes of the world the orthodoxies have been duly heard, and roundly ignored.

We are writers. We danced with words, as children, in what became familiar patterns. The words became our friends and our companions, and without even saying it aloud, a thought danced with them: I can do this. This is who I am.

the most sacred business of judges is not to ratify the will of the majority but to protect the minority from its tyranny.

Reading is another thing that has made me more human by exposing me to worlds I might never have entered and people I might never meet.

I got a fortune cookie that said, "To remember is to understand." I have never forgotten it. A good judge remembers what it was like to be a lawyer. A good editor remembers being a writer. A good parent remembers what it was like to be a child.

I think we now know the limits also of intelligence and rhetoric.

There is something so settled and stodgy about turning a great romance into next of kin on an emergency room form, and something so soothing and special, too.