You don't have to be old in America to say of a world you lived in: 'that world is gone.'

My generation, faced as it grew with a choice between religious belief and existential despair, chose marijuana. Now we are in our Cabernet stage.

I think miracles exist in part as gifts and in part as clues that there is something beyond the flat world we see.

Read good, big important things.

The first snow always startles. It covers the tricycle in the driveway, turning its frame into an abstact sculpture that says: See how quickly yesterday turns into today.

The Democratic Party will now stick with its guy forever, no matter how harmful he is. Perhaps you call that loyalty, and perhaps there's something to it, but a bigger part, I believe, is that you have come to think that winning is everything-that victory is the purpose of politics.

The biggest political change in my lifetime is that Americans no longer assume that their children will have it better than they did. This is a huge break with the past, with assumptions and traditions that shaped us.