Reporters are not paid to operate in retrospect. Because when news begins to solidify into current events and finally harden intohistory, it is the stories we didn't write, the questions we didn't ask that prove far, far more damaging than the ones we did.

I'm going to live long enough to live in an America that will assume universal health care is a basic right. That will be amusing and terrific.

Maybe I had three children in the first place so I wouldn't ever have to play board games. In my religion, martyrs die.

A friend and I flew south with our children. During the week we spent together I took off my shoes, let down my hair, took apart my psyche, cleaned the pieces, and put them together again in much improved condition. I feel like a car that's just had a tune-up. Only another woman could have acted as the mechanic.

I'm very optimistic. I think if you would describe me, my pretty consistent affect is that I'm a pretty happy person.

I think one of the hardest things about doing a book in the first person is that to a certain extent each day, when you begin to do your work, you're climbing into somebody else's skin.

[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.