One of the interesting things I discovered, talking about your grandmother, is I did a search of my uses of the word "elderly" in my copy over the years, and you will not be surprised to hear that the older I got the less often I used the word elderly in print.

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

Even as we enumerate their shortcomings, the rigor of raising children ourselves makes clear to us our mothers' incredible strength. We fear both. If they are not strong, who will protect us? If they are not imperfect, how can we equal them?

All the things we don’t say, all the words we swallow, and it makes nothing but trouble.

Don't ever forget the words on a postcard that my father sent me last year: "If you win the rat race, you're still a rat.

Athletes are American princes and the locker room is their castle. Some of them behave in princely fashion, become legitimate heroes to us all. And some are jerks.

[After my mother died, I had a feeling that was] not unlike the homesickness that always filled me for the first few days when I went to stay at my grandparents'' house, and even, I was stunned to discover, during the first few months of my freshman year at college. It was not really the home my mother had made that I yearned for. But I was sick in my soul for that greater meaning of home that we understand most purely when we are children, when it is a metaphor for all possible feelings of security, of safety, of what is predictable, gentle, and good in life.