All parents should be aware that when they mock or curse gay people, they may be mocking or cursing their own child.

[In the aftermath of death] Small talk feels too small, big talk too enormous.

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

Ethnic stereotypes are misshapen pearls, sometimes with a sandy grain of truth at their center. ... but they ignore complexity, change, and individuality.

You just can't tell or calibrate motive or intelligence or sense. So I don't read anything unless someone tells me that it's really smart or illuminating. I don't read any reviews anymore and it's been really liberating.

Ever since the Evil Empire turned out to be a collection of third-world countries, Americans aligned on the far right have tried to cast gay men and lesbians as the new enemy, calculating deviants seducing the nation's young, anti-Avon ladies selling sodomy door-to-door. This simply won't wash. Just as seeing the Russians up close and personal on television humanized them, so seeing the lesbian grandmother of two little girls wearing her gold medal with pride makes the notion of otherness, much less deviance, silly and ignorant.

Women are the glue that holds our day-to-day world together.