Juliet and Romeo be damned, you can't be in love until you've flossed your teeth next to the person at least three hundred times.

Life was a freight train barreling toward just one stop, our loved ones streaking past our windows in blurs of color and light. There was no holding on to any of it, and no slowing it down.

Always live your life with your biography in mind," Dad was fond of saying. "Naturally, it won't be published unless you have a Magnificent Reason, but at the very least you will be living grandly.

Just when you think you've hit rock bottom, you realize you're standing on another trapdoor.

Juliet and Romeo be damned, you can't be in love until you've flossed your teeth next to the person at least three hundred times.

In college I studied '60s and '70s radicalism, student activism, forms of political violence, groups like the Weathermen, the Black Panthers, the Symbionese Liberation Army, the New Left.

As much as some people would like to believe, for their own peace of mind, that the appearance of evil in this world had a clean cause, the truth was never that simple.