I would be the most content if my children grew up to be the kind of people who think decorating consists mostly of building enough bookshelves.

[President Johnson] had the political will to say that having one in five Americans living in the kind of abject conditions their fellow citizens associated with Third World countries and the novels of Dickens was as dangerous as any battlefield enemy.

The problem with freedom is that you just can't go back. Once people see what it means to be free people, you can't go back. So they're going to keep nattering on about this and that, and maybe they'll make another stab at de-funding the fabulous Planned Parenthood or something of the sort. To my mind, it's just not going to work.

Reading is not simply an intellectual pursuit but an emotional and spiritual one. It lights the candle in the hurricane lamp of self; that's why it survives

Familiarity breeds content.

The reason child care is such a loaded issue is that when we talk about it, we are always tacitly talking about motherhood. And when we're talking about motherhood we're always tacitly assuming that child care must be a very dim second to full-time mother care.

Jane Austen may not be the best writer, but she certainly writes about the best people. And by that I mean people just like me.