All of life like a series of tableaux, and in the living we missed so much, hid so much, left so much undone and unsaid.

The Cairo conferenceis about a complicated web of education and employment, consumption and poverty, development and health care. It is also about whether governments will follow where women have so clearly led them, toward safe, simple and reliable choices in family planning. While Cairo crackles with conflict, in the homes of the world the orthodoxies have been duly heard, and roundly ignored.

I don't really read what people write about me. Someone gives my novel one star; are they a troll? Are they someone who hates my politics and so has decided to do that?

If you want something, it will elude you. If you do not want something, you will get ten of it in the mail.

It is so easy to exist instead of live.

There are obvious places in which government can narrow the chasm between haves and have-nots. One is the public schools, which have been seen as the great leveler, the authentic melting pot. That, today, is nonsense. In his scathing study of the nation's public school system entitled "Savage Inequalities," Jonathan Kozol made manifest the truth: that we have a system that discriminates against the poor in everything from class size to curriculum.

All of the qualities that you need to be a good opinion columnist tend to be qualities that aren't valued in women.