I think of modern marriage as a car strangely fashioned out of an old abandoned horse carriage, built upon the framework of a mule cart. All the original engineering is still there, underneath it all.

eventually, everything goes away.

They say that there are three kinds of people in the world. There are people who never learn one way or another anything; there are people who learn from their own mistakes, eventually and with great pain; and then there are the really wise people who learn from other people's mistakes and spare themselves the suffering.

There is hardly a more gracious gift that we can offer somebody than to accept them fully, to love them almost despite themselves.

The Augusteum warns me not to get attached to any obsolete ideas about who I am, what I represent, whom I belong to, or what function I may once have intended to serve.

The story he [Todd Willingham] told me was this: He woke up to a fire. He ran out of the house and couldn't run back in to save his children, and that was enough to get me interested. ... There's a writer in me that's like, ... this is a great story. ... I have a good friend, who was my neighbor at the time, and I told her about it. ... She had been a reporter, and she was like, "Let's go investigate it."

Nobody's really paying that much attention to your massive personal dramas.