I'm intrigued by how ordinary behavior exists so close beside its opposite.

My father died in my arms. That's tumult. That's everything exploding.

Only sometimes you can't feel anything about a subject without hypothesizing its extinction.

If sportswriting teaches you anything, and there is much truth to it as well as plenty of lies, it is that for your life to be worth anything you must sooner or later face the possibility of terrible, searing regret. Though you must also manage to avoid it or your life will be ruined.

The art of living your life has a lot to do with getting over loss. The less the past haunts you, the better.

Americans don't have saner gun laws because most Americans, including those citizens who puzzle over better angels, don't want saner gun laws.

Something will be there when the flood recedes. We know that. It will be those people now standing in the water, and on those rooftops - many black, many poor. Homeless. Overlooked. And it will be New Orleans - though its memory may be shortened, its self-gaze and eccentricity scoured out so that what's left is a city more like other cities, less insular, less self-regarding, but possibly more self-knowing after today. A city on firmer ground.