Well, we tell our kids things like 'don't gossip' and then an hour later they hear us on the phone. Stuff like that.

The victim mentality may be the last uncomplicated thing about life in America.

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

A writer is always working with whatever she's managed to store in the brainpan or puzzle out about the world.

I learned to live many years ago. Something really, really bad happened to me, something that changed my life in ways that, if I had my druthers, it would never have been changed at all. What I learned from it is that today seems to be the hardest lesson of all. I learned to love the journey, not the destination. I learned that it is not a dress rehearsal, and that today is the only guarantee you get. I learned to look at all the good in the world and to try to give some of it back because I believed in it completely and utterly.

I remember adolescence, the years of having the impulse control of a mousetrap, of being as private as a safe-deposit box.

There are a million moving parts to raising kids, and you can't always anticipate them all, especially when they are teenagers and their peers play such a huge role in their lives. If you offer independence, there is one kind of pitfall; if you shelter them too much, there is another. And sometimes you do everything right and something bad just happens. It's as simple, and as scary, as that.