Because of my mother, who gave me definitions, I knew what I was committed to in life. ... I had the most satisfactory of childhoods because Mother, small, delicate-boned, witty, and articulate, turned out to be exactly my age.

Because of my mother, who gave me definitions, I knew what I was committed to in life. ... I had the most satisfactory of childhoods because Mother, small, delicate-boned, witty, and articulate, turned out to be exactly my age.

Springtime is a season we tend to forget as we grow older, and yet far back in our memories, like the landscape of a country visited long ago, it's always there.

I happen to like household chores and resent them only when performing them makes it difficult for me to fulfill my professional duties.

Ah, trouble, trouble, there are the two different kinds ... there's the one you give and the other you take.

There is only one history of any importance, and it is the history of what you once believed in, and the history of what you came to believe in.

The decision to speak out is the vocation and lifelong peril by which the intellectual must live.