My wife and I would be very comfortable having a baby at home, or using one of the terrific nurse-midwives at the hospital.

As Jeremy Bentham had asked about animals well over two hundred years ago, the question was not whether they could reason or talk, but could they suffer? And yet, somehow, it seemed to take more imagination for humans to identify with animal suffering than it did to conceive of space flight or cloning or nuclear fusion. Yes, she was a fanatic in the eyes of most of the country. . .Mostly, however, she just lacked patience for people who wouldn't accept her belief that humans inflicted needless agony on the animals around them, and they did so in numbers that were absolutely staggering.

My mother used to talk about passages and, once in a while, about ordeals. We all have them; we are all shaped by them. She thought the key was to find the healing in the hurt.

He recalls what that first German soldier said to his major: No God-not yours or mine-approves of what you're doing.

We may talk a good game and write even better ones, but we never outgrow those small wounded things we were when we were five and six and seven.

I have lived with magic and without magic, and I can tell you with certainty that a life with magic is better.

Dead … might not be quiet at all.