I wasn't even in a newspaper office where I was getting assignments in competition with other people. I remember earlier, though, that I knew a young woman who had been published in the New Yorker, and I was so jealous of her. It wasn't exactly a personal competition. I just envied that accomplishment.

People waste more time waiting for someone to take charge of their lives than they do in any other pursuit.

The art of being helpful is behaving as if everything we do matters - because we never know which things might.

I've finally figured out why soap operas are, and logically should be, so popular with generations of housebound women. They are the only place in our culture where grown-up men take seriously all the things that grown-up women have to deal with all day long.

There's a big gap between public opinion polls and the vote in Washington, in Congress. The majority consciousness has changed, and often that has made very clear, practical changes in our daily lives, but the centers of power are still not occupied, for the most part, by this new consciousness.

It used to be said that this country was a child-centered one. Nothing could be further from the truth. Children have been our lowest priority, both in economic and emotional spending.

Every revolution begins as consciousness because some group of people has to imagine change. You have to have the idea of change or at least have a hope before you can proceed. And that stage goes very quickly because a contagion of consciousness is within your control. But when you get to the stage of institutional change, it becomes a much slower process.