Many people find it easy to imagine unseen webs of malevolent conspiracy in the world, and they are not always wrong. But there is also an innocence that conspires to hold humanity together, and it is made of people who can never fully know the good that they have done.

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.

Paul Farmer has helped to build amazing health care system in one of the poorest areas of Haiti. He founded Partners in Health, which serves the destitute and the sick in many parts of the world from Haiti to Boston and from Russia to Peru.

What interests me is trying to catch the reflection of the human being on the page. I'm interested in how ordinary people live their lives

I am grateful to Stacy Schiff first of all because she can write a sentence-because she offers us her scholarship with wit, clarity, and grace. Once again, she has done what only the best writers can do: she has made the world new, again.

The combination of domesticity and wildness - that's a deep expression