Raising your kids vegetarian is a great way to encourage them to do the opposite of what you want! But the goal is not to have them have the same values that I have. It's to have them act on their values.

Everything I did, I did because I thought it was the correct thing to do… I am not a hero, it is true… But I am not a bad person, either.

If nothing matters, there's nothing to save.

None of the ways people were talking about September 11 felt right to me. I don't buy into the way George W. Bush talks about it. I don't buy into the way the 9/11 commission talks about it. It isn't that I don't believe them. It's just that they're not the tellings for me.

As long as I am thinking, I am alive.

It is better to lose than never to have had.

I didn't intend to write about totems or people searching. I tried not to constrain myself, and this is what I ended up with. There's this great Auden quote: "I look at what I write so I can see what I think."