Hello Kitty will never speak.

Hello Kitty will never speak.

Writing is, in the end, that oddest of anomalies: an intimate letter to a stranger.

In an age of distraction, nothing can feel more luxurious than paying attention.

You rebel against your parents until you become them. One day you look in the mirror and you see your father's face.

A comma . . . catches the gentle drift of the mind in thought, turning in on itself and back on itself, reversing, redoubling, and returning along the course of its own sweet river music; while the semicolon brings clauses and thoughts together with all the silent discretion of a hostess arranging guests around her dinner table.

We have more and more ways to communicate, as Thoreau noted, but less and less to say.