Yes, it seems we've got this mutant gene in our human personality that makes us susceptible to this same kind of mistake over and over again. It's really uncanny how we build these beautiful multicultural edifices and then allow this switch to be flipped and everybody goes, 'Oh, the other, get them out of here.

When I write a word in English, a simple one, such as, say, 'chief,' I have unwittingly ushered a querulous horde into the room. The Roman legionary is there, shaking his 'cap,' or head, and Al Cap is there, slouching in his signature working man's headgear.

My sentences tend to be very short and rather spare. I'm more your paragraph kind of gal.

Moral certainty can deafen people to any truth other than their own.

There are always a few who stand up in times of communal madness and have the courage to say that what unites us is greater than what divides us.

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?

They say the Lord's Day is a day of rest, but those who preach this generally are not women.