Where there are children, people become neighbors; they don't merely hold property adjacent to one another.

In the bad sixties, when drugs came into widespread use among adolescents and when Scarsdale mothers developed the habit of not asking about each others children for fear of what they'd hear, one knew that they were speaking-or not speaking, keeping their unhappy silence-on behalf of stricken motherhood everywhere in the country.

At best-which is to say, even where our knowledge of a case comes to us only through courtroom evidence-it is difficult for the legal process to keep us at a sanitizing distance from crimes of passion.

The distinction that Jews have themselves always made between Jews of German origin and Jews of East European origin is as stringent as that between Boston Brahmin and Boston lace-curtain Irish, though much finer.

Ideology is the sterner face of myth and we're a myth-making people.

[On Marilyn Monroe:] I think my response to her death was the common one: it came to me with the impact of a personal deprivation but I also felt it as I might a catastrophe in history or in nature; there was less in life, there was less of life, because she had ceased to exist. In her loss life itself had been injured.

Where there are children, people become neighbors; they don't merely hold property adjacent to one another.