I think that after a while you realize that your husband can't be all things to you and certainly you don't want the kids to be all things to you, because that would be a terrible weight for them; and that where you really find solace a lot of the time is with your girlfriends.

Fifty years ago, teachers said their top discipline problems were talking, chewing gum, making noise, and running in the halls. The current list, by contrast, sounds like a cross between a rap sheet and the seven deadly sins.

More than a decade after our fellow citizens began bedding down on the sidewalks, their problems continue to seem so intractable that we have begun to do psychologically what government has been incapable of doing programmatically. We bring the numbers down--not by solving the problem, but by deciding it's their own damn fault.

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

The difference between government and leadership is that leadership has a soul.

Raising a child is a little like Picasso's work; in the beginning he did very conventional representational things. Cubism came after he had the rules down pat.

I believe that in a contest between the living and the almost living, the latter must, if necessary, give way to the will of the former.