It is so easy to waste our lives: Our days, our hours, our minutes ... it is so easy to exist instead of live.

The beginning and the end are never really the journey of discovery for me. It is the middle that remains a puzzle until well into the writing. That's how life is most of the time, isn't it? You know where you are and where you hope to wind up. It's the getting there that's challenging.

The Church does an enormous amount of good, and it carries one of the most valuable messages imaginable - that you should love your neighbor as yourself, and that if you have two coats you should give one to the man who has none.

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.

America is a country that seems forever to be toddler or teenager, at those two stages of human development characterized by conflict between autonomy and security.

I was a kid who sometimes got in trouble because I couldn't keep my mouth shut, which turned out to be an advantage when I became an opinion columnist.

knowledge of our own mortality is the greatest gift God ever gives us.