My home was in a pleasant place outside of Philadelphia. But I really lived, truly lived, somewhere else. I lived within the covers of books.

the joy of someone who had been a reader all her life, whose world had been immeasurably enlarged by the words of others.

Raising a child is a little like Picasso's work; in the beginning he did very conventional representational things. Cubism came after he had the rules down pat.

And sometimes you do everything right and something bad just happens. It's as simple, and as scary, as that.

I think at every moment in the last probably 100 years, when the institutional church had the opportunity to do the right thing, they did the wrong thing. They're a dying institution in many parts of the world because they refuse to ordain women or married people. And now they're a dying institution because some of their members did enormous harm to young people and instead of responding aggressively with humility, and with love, and with the confession of wrongdoing, they tried to spin it as though they were a political party, and that's just deplorable.

That's really what I want in a leader; I want somebody who's really, really smart.

When I'm falling, my girlfriends are my soft landing.