I wish I could remember where I put things. I spend half my life looking for my keys. With the other half I look for my glasses.

White-collar crime gets more outrageous by the second in America.

Hard to remember who is more dangerous: the people who are attacking our liberties overseas, or those who are suppressing them at home.

When I tell people I was in the St. Justin Martyr parish, if they are native Chicagoans they know exactly where I was and what that was like. The Sunday before this particular march, the archbishop of Chicago, Cardinal Cody, had required all of his pastors to read a letter in support of open housing and economic justice in every parish in the city.

I'm a grandmother, and a mighty proud one.

I had a fantasy as a child that I might be a writer someday. I always thought that meant you went to New York or Paris. But after that intense summer, I never thought that I wanted to live any place but Chicago. It also made me see what the stakes were in the civil rights movement. And it made me see what real hatred was like and the forms that it took. But it also made me understand how powerless ordinary people feel in their lives.

Never underestimate a man's ability to underestimate a woman.