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.

The heart does not go backward. Only the mind.

I love to cook and I've cooked a lot of Bulgarian food over the years.

I wondered why she craved this knowledge and found myself remembering that she was, after all, an anthropologist.

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.

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.

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.