A life of unremitting caution, without the carefree - or even, occasionally, the careless - may turn out to be half a life.

[After my mother died, I had a feeling that was] not unlike the homesickness that always filled me for the first few days when I went to stay at my grandparents'' house, and even, I was stunned to discover, during the first few months of my freshman year at college. It was not really the home my mother had made that I yearned for. But I was sick in my soul for that greater meaning of home that we understand most purely when we are children, when it is a metaphor for all possible feelings of security, of safety, of what is predictable, gentle, and good in life.

Socialized medicine, some still cry, but it's long been socialized, with those covered paying for those who are underinsured. American medicine is simply socialized badly, penny wise and pound foolish.

the joy of someone who had been a reader all her life, whose world had been immeasurably enlarged by the words of others.

When you leave college, there are thousands of people out there with the same degree you have; when you get a job, there will be thousands of people doing what you want to do for a living. But you are the only person alive who has sole custody of your life.

When an actress takes off her clothes onscreen but a nursing mother is told to leave, what message do we send about the roles of women?

It's so much easier to write a resume than to craft a spirit.