...Attempts at imitation would put the emphasis where it didn't belong. The goal was to improve the lives of others, not oneself.

Curing yourself of obsessive compulsive disorder by going to a strip club is pretty strange.

God gives us humans everything we need to flourish, but he's not the one who's supposed to divvy up the loot. That charge was laid upon us

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

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

My big struggle is how people can not care, erase, not remember.

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.