The very worst impulses of humankind can survive generations, centuries, even millennia. And the best of our individual efforts can die with us at the end of a single lifetime.

My guess is that he remembers some of me, some of us together, and the rest rolled off him like topsoil in a flash flood.

It was good to walk into a library again; it smelled like home.

It's funny; in this era of e-mail and voice mail and all those things that even I did not grow up with, a plain old paper letter takes on amazing intimacy.

As you know, human history is full of evil deeds, and maybe we ought to think of them with tears, not fascination.

Then you must say to her, 'Madame, I observe that your heart is broken. Allow me to repair it for you.

It was not the brutality of what occurred next that changed my mind and brought home to me the full meaning of fear. It was the brilliance of it.