If you want to write what the world is about, you have to write details...real life is in the dishes. Real life is pushing strollers up the street, folding T-shirts, the alarm clock going off early and you dropping into bed exhausted every night. That's real life.

the separation of church and state grew out of a desire, not so much to protect government from religion, but to protect religion from government.

Books are the plane, and the train, and the road. They are the destination, and the journey. They are home.

It makes me angry to think that . . . female sanitation workers will spend their days doing a job most of their co-workers think they can't handle, and then they will go home and do another job most of their co-workers don't want.

Life is made up of moments, small pieces of glittering mica in a long stretch of gray cement.

Speech is the voice of the heart.

The misdeeds of ordinary men can be buried with them, and their lives described in half-truths that are really half-lies. But not a public man. Particularly not this one.