The city has to do what any citizen or family does, when you have a dream. You tighten your belt. You sacrifice some luxuries. Above all, you don't waste a dime.

Adventure,' then, is what might otherwise be called hardship if it were attempted in a different spirit. Turning a difficult task or a perilous journey into an adventure is largely a matter of telling yourself the right story about it, which is one thing that Lewis's child characters have learned from reading, 'the right books.

Dreams would always end with you, and then mornings would steal you away with a cruelty that haunted my days.

In the year since we brought things into the open with a clean breath of fresh air at City Hall, we have learned about corrupt spending practices and unethical conflicts of interest that waste your money... and keep Dallas from being the great city of our dreams.

In many ways, our campaign this year will be the same as last time: We're still going to focus on fixing up basics and cleaning up ethics at City Hall.

Every small town that I had ever been to had had a caboose.

A great novelist excels on the small scale and the large, the individual leaf and root as well as the forest; good fiction convinces us that the imaginary is real by selecting exactly the right detail and rendering it perfectly.