. . . the messiness of experience, that may be what we mean by life.

It is only a short step from exaggerating what we can find in the world to exaggerating our power to remake the world. Expecting more novelty than there is, more greatness than there is, and more strangeness than there is, we imagine ourselves masters of a plastic universe. But a world we can shape to our will is a shapeless world.

We need not be theologians to see that we have shifted responsibility for making the world interesting from God to the newspaperman.

By reading we discover our world, our history, and ourselves.

Standing, standing, standing - why do I have to stand all the time? That is the main characteristic of social Washington.

Dispersed as the Jews are, they still form one nation, foreign to the land they live in.

A pseudo-event ... comes about because someone has planned it, planted, or incited it. Typically, it is not a train wreck or an earthquake, but an interview.