If you had an essentially happy childhood, that tends to dwell with you.

In order to go on with our lives, we are always capable of making the ominous into the merely strange.

That's when I feel most alive, he told me once on an airplane, when I'm helping people.

The only real nation is humanity

Most teachers have little control over school policy or curriculum or choice of texts or special placement of students, but most have a great deal of autonomy inside the classroom. To a degree shared by only a few other occupations, such as police work, public education rests precariously on the skill and virtue of the people at the bottom of the institutional pyramid.

Writing is revision. All prose responds to work.

Public education rests precariously on the skill and virtue of the people at the bottom of the institutional pyramid.