Who is to blame for this most recent of sports disgraces in America? The culture that flings young athletes like Tyson up out of obscurity, makes millionaires of them and watches them self-destruct?

Not what the mind sees, but what the mind imagines the eye must see.

We are linked by blood, and blood is memory without language.

Each genre exerts a considerable spell, as a kind of "form" to be filled, as a Shakespearean sonnet is filled.

Where there must be a choice, a girl will choose Daddy. Even if you are Mommy, you concede that this must be so: you remember when you were a girl, too.

We are stimulated to emotional response, not by works that confirm our sense of the world, but by works that challenge it.

Ultimately, we measure ourselves against our own ideas of idealism and perfection, and we don't always come very close to them.