The Church became both more accessible and less imposing. It threw itself open to risk.

Over the years, he [Everett Dirksen] developed a style of infinitely subtle fustian, whose effect can still be remotely approximated by sipping twelve-year-old bourbon, straight, while reading Dickens aloud, in a sort of sepulchral purr.

The Clinton's secret is that they live in a morally discontinuous universe-events do not have consequences, and what happened 15 minutes ago has no connection to what happens now. Beware of power when it masters the secret of popular amnesia.

The television anchorman Dan Rather turns up in rag-top native drag in Afghanistan, the surrogate of our culture with his camera crew, intrepid as Sir Richard Burton sneaking into Mecca.

Everywhere you hang your hat is home. Home is the bright cave under the hat.

Abstinence is a window of clarity through which one can better find one's work and one's mate.

A rattlesnake loose in the living room tends to end all discussion of animal rights.