Nothing could make me forget what the Reagan years had actually been like.

If I'm in a political argument, I think I can, with reasonable accuracy and without boasting, put the other person's side of the case at least as well as they could. One has to be able to say that in any well-conducted argument.

To the dumb question, 'Why me?' the cosmos barely bothers to return the reply, 'Why not?'

It's probably a merciful thing that pain is impossible to describe from memory

Name one moral action performed by a believer that could not have been done by a nonbeliever.

My chief consolation in this year of living dyingly has been the presence of friends.

To be the father of growing daughters is to understand something of what Yeats evokes with his imperishable phrase 'terrible beauty.' Nothing can make one so happily exhilarated or so frightened: it's a solid lesson in the limitations of self to realize that your heart is running around inside someone else's body. It also makes me quite astonishingly calm at the thought of death: I know whom I would die to protect and I also understand that nobody but a lugubrious serf can possibly wish for a father who never goes away.