She was like a butterfly, full of color and vibrancy when she chose to open her wings, yet hardly visible when she closed them.

I was really interested in how marriages work, how you can, you know, be in love with somebody and spend many years with your lives intertwined, but in the end another soul can be fundamentally unknowable. And I think that the stress of war, when one party goes away and the other has to deal at home, is a really testing time in a lot of marriages.

The brave man, the real hero, quakes with terror, sweats, feels his very bowels betray him, and in spite of this moves forward to do the act he dreads.

September 11, 2001, revealed heroism in ordinary people who might have gone through their lives never called upon to demonstrate the extent of their courage.

It is human nature to imagine, to put yourself in another's shoes. The past may be another country. But the only passport required is empathy.

Does any woman ever count the grains of her harvest and say: Good enough? Or does one always think of what more one might have laid in, had the labor been harder, the ambition more vast, the choices more sage?

If a man is to lose his fortune, it is a good thing if he were poor before he acquired it, for poverty requires aptitude.