We lived our lives as if life was forever. To live one's life without a sense of time is to squander it.

We lived our lives as if life was forever. To live one's life without a sense of time is to squander it.

Behind the contained and orderly lives we lead as members of the respectable middle class there's a terrible human capacity that may one day overwhelm any of us.

Long-married couples balance their checkbooks as a substitute for love-making, or they refuse each other love by protesting one another's financial error or excess.

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.

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