Basbanes makes you love books.

Nobody ever gets what they want when it comes to love.

Who are we but the stories we tell about ourselves, particularly if we accept them?

I cannot think of a day in my life when the library didn’t exert a potent attraction for me, offering a sense of the specialness of each individual’s curiosity and his or her quest to satisfy it.

After a week, it's better. I miss her. I mourn her. But some peace has returned. She had been so unattainable - so young, so much a citizen of a different era - that it is hard to feel fully deprived.

The issue is not whether there are horrible cases where the penalty seems "right". The real question is whether we will ever design a capital system that reaches only the "right" cases, without dragging in the wrong cases, cases of innocence or cases where death is not proportionate punishment. Slowly, even reluctantly, I have realized the answer to that question is no- we will never get it right.

That led me to say that when push comes to shove, I'm against capital punishment.