As they marched, the crowds lining the route broke into applause, a sweet and deeply felt spontaneous pattering that was a sort of communal embrace. Welcome home.

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.

A day cannot live in infamy without the nourishment of rage. Let's have rage.

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.

Not to forgive is to be imprisoned by the past, by old grievances that do not permit life to proceed with new business.

One can live with the thought of one's own death. It is the thought of the death of the words and books that is terrifying for that is the deeper extinction.