Love is a powerful painkiller.

Memo to extreme partisans: If you can't bring yourselves to love your enemies, can you at least learn to hate your friends?

When Loughner himself speaks and we find out his real influences are Spiderman, 'Gnome Chomsky,' Taylor Swift, and Dr. Bronner, then what?

At the beginning of a novel, a writer needs confidence, but after that what's required is persistence. These traits sound similar. They aren't. Confidence is what politicians, seducers and currency speculators have, but persistence is a quality found in termites. It's the blind drive to keep on working that persists after confidence breaks down.

What was more humiliating, I wondered: having to beg for someone's cold chicken bones or being offered them?

Reason leavened with a little wit (if possible) is the real alternative to hate speech, meaning that there's no better time for it.

Just breathing can be such a luxury sometimes.