You may never know when things start to go bad, but when things are worse you know it.

In the many times I have seen Hillary [Clinton] speak, she never fails to dazzle audiences by speaking in paragraphs, without notes.

Sex and older women used to be considered an oxymoron, rarely mentioned in the same breath.

Speed as a drug disorganizes the personality; speed as the goal of information dissemination commits a subtler crime. People are mainlining our words. We rarely read of the rational alternatives, only of the commands that all must change or else. This is a prescription for public panic.

Being a pathfinder is to be willing to risk failure and still go on.

A seasoned woman is spicy. She has been marinated in life experiences. Like a complex wine, she can be alternately sweet, tart, sparkling, mellow. She is both maternal and playful. Assured, alluring, and resourceful. She is less likely to have an agenda than a young woman-no biological clock tick-tocking beside her lover's bed, no campaign to lead him to the altar, no rescue fantasies. The seasoned woman knows who she is. She could be any one of us, as long a she is committed to living fully and passionately in the second half of her life, despite failures and false starts.

My mother had demonstrated that the best way to defeat the numbing ambivalence of middle age is to surprise yourself - by pulling off some cartwheel of thought or action never even imagined at a younger age.