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More Than A Decade After Our Fellow Citizens Began Bedding Down On The Sidewalks, Their Problems Continue To Seem So Intractable That We Have Begun To Do Psychologically What Government Has Been Incapable Of Doing Programmatically. We Bring The Numbers Down--not By Solving The Problem, But By Deciding It's Their Own Damn Fault.

-Anna Quindlen

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More Than A Decade

Anna Quindlen

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More Than A Decade After Our Fellow Citizens Began Bedding Down On The Sidewalks, Their Problems Continue To Seem So Intractable That We Have Begun To Do Psychologically What Government Has Been Incapable Of Doing Programmatically. We Bring The Numbers Down--not By Solving The Problem, But By Deciding It's Their Own Damn Fault.

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Speech Is The Voice Of The Heart.

Americans Like Warm Characters. It's Why, No Matter What He Did In The Early Days, They Kind Of Resonated To Bill Clinton Because He Seems Like A Guy That You Could Sit Down And Have A Burger And A Beer With. It's Even Why, Despite The Fact That He Sometimes Seemed To Be Not Firing On All Cylinders, Lots Of Them Still Like George W. Bush - Because He Seemed Like The Kind Of Guy You Could Have A Burger And A Beer With.

I Would Even Go To Washington, Which Is Saying Something For Me, Just To Glimpse Jane Q. Public, Being Sworn In As The First Female President Of The United States, While Her Husband Holds The Bible And Wears A Silly Pill Box Hat And Matching Coat.

The Voices Of Conformity Speak So Loudly. Don't Listen To Them. No One Does The Right Thing Out Of Fear. If You Ever Utter The Words, 'we've Always Done It That Way,' I Urge You To Wash Out Your Mouth With Soap.

I Go Online All The Time, I Just Don't Read About Myself. I Read A Fashion Website Called Go Fug Yourself. I Actually Correspond With The Fug Girls And That's Great.

My Most Pronounced Writing Habit Is Trying Not To Write.

Decorating Consists Mostly Of Building Enough Bookshelves.

Independent Bookstores

You Teach Your 16-year-old With Your Heart In Your Mouth To Be A Good Driver And None Of That Makes Any Difference When Some Drunk Comes Around A Corner And Runs A Stop Sign.

It Is Hard To Find Someone Who Will Give Your Children A Feeling Of Security While It Lasts And Not Wound Them Too Much When It Isfinished, Who Will Treat Those Children As If They Were Her Own, But Knows--and Never Forgets--that They Are Yours.

I'm Going To Live Long Enough To Live In An America That Will Assume Universal Health Care Is A Basic Right. That Will Be Amusing And Terrific.

There's Some Muscle Group Around Your Shoulders That Seizes Up During The Perfection Dance And Doesn't Let Go Until You Are Asleep, Or Alone. Or Maybe It Never Really Lets Go At All.

The One Thing That I Always Got Positive Reinforcement For From Teachers, Who Really Changed My Life, Was The Written Word.

The World Is Full Of Women Blindsided By The Unceasing Demands Of Motherhood, Still Flabbergasted By How A Job Can Be Terrific Andtorturous, Involving And Utterly Tedious, All At The Same Time. The World Is Full Of Women Made To Feel Strange Because What Everyone Assumes Comes Naturally Is So Difficult To Do--never Mind To Do Well.

Ask Any Woman How She Makes It Through The Day, And She May Mention Her Calendar, Her To-do Lists, Her Babysitter. But If You Push Her On How She Really Makes It Through Her Day, She Will Mention Her Girlfriends.

Obama Doesn't Seem Like A Burger And A Beer Kind Of Guy. I Have To Say, I Don't Find That Problematic At All.

There May Perhaps Be A New Generation Of Doctors Horrified By Lacerations, Infections, Women Who Have Douched With Kitchen Cleanser. What An Irony It Would Be If Fanatics Continued To Kill And Yet It Was The Apathy And Silence Of The Medical Profession That Most Wounded The Ability To Provide What Is, After All, A Medical Procedure.

Predictions That Unit Cohesion Could Not Survive Honesty About Sexual Orientation Were Simply Wrong. What Does Threaten Morale Arethe Prolonged Investigations, The Questioning Of Friends And Co-workers, The Searches Of Barracks For Magazines And Letters, The Witch Hunts.

There's Something Undeniable About The Posture Of A Person Trying Not To Acknowledge Your Existance

Wow, So Much Of The Way I've Transacted My Life... So Much Of The Results That I'm Happy About Are Because Of What Daddy Did.

You Can Get Rid Of The Column. It's A Little Like Staying At A Hotel; You Get Used To The Shape Of The Room, And Then You're Gone. With A Novel You Move Into Town And Stay For A Long Time. That's Both Comforting And Terrifying.

I Sometimes Think That Courage Is The Thing That You Need More Than Any Other Thing. It's Fear That Cripples Us. It's Fear That Accounts For Racism, It's Fear That Accounts For Sexism, For Xenophobia.

One Of The Interesting Things I Discovered, Talking About Your Grandmother, Is I Did A Search Of My Uses Of The Word "elderly" In My Copy Over The Years, And You Will Not Be Surprised To Hear That The Older I Got The Less Often I Used The Word Elderly In Print.

Grief Remains One Of The Few Things That Has The Power To Silence Us.

And A Great Misunderstanding Is That Children Think Their Parents Are Grown-up, And Parents Feel Obliged To Act As If They Were.

London Opens To You Like A Novel Itself. [...] It Is Divided Into Chapters, The Chapters Into Scenes, The Scenes Into Sentences; It Opens To You Like A Series Of Rooms, Door, Passsage, Door. Mayfair To Piccadilly To Soho To The Strand.

Since The Age Of Five I Had Been One Of Those People Who Was An Indefatigable Reader, More Inclined To Go Off By Myself With A Book Than Do Any Of The Dozens Of Things That Children Usually Do To Amuse Themselves. I Never Aged Out Of It.

Uncontrollable Consumerism Has Become A Watchword Of Our Culture Despite Regular And Compelling Calls For Its End. The United States Has More Malls Than High Schools; Americans Spend More Time Shopping Than Reading. ... Some Of The Most Insightful Writing About The American Character Over The Nation's History Has Been About Neither Freedom Nor Democracy But About The Crazed Impulse To Acquire Things.

I Think There Are Some Stories That Need To Be Told By A Specific Person As Opposed To In The Third Person.

London Has The Trick Of Making Its Past, Its Long Indelible Past, Always A Part Of Its Present. And For That Reason It Will Always Have Meaning For The Future, Because Of All It Can Teach About Disaster, Survival, And Redemption. It Is All There In The Streets. It Is All There In The Books.

So I Do Think Sometimes The Political Mechanism Is Completely Disconnected From The People. However, What I Will Say Is That History Tells Us That Whenever Things Start To Move Too Fast, Whenever Progress Makes People Feel A Little Breathless, One Of The Go-to Spots That Government, That The Ruling Powers That Society Goes To Is To Try To Repress Women.

Don't Ever Forget The Words On A Postcard That My Father Sent Me Last Year: "if You Win The Rat Race, You're Still A Rat.

So Carry Your Courage In An Easily Accessible Place, The Way You Do Your Cellphone Or Your Wallet. You May Still Falter Or Fail, But You Always Know That You Pushed Hard And Aimed High. Take A Leap Of Faith. Fear Not. Courage Is The Ultimate Career Move.

I Learned To Live Many Years Ago. Something Really, Really Bad Happened To Me, Something That Changed My Life In Ways That, If I Had My Druthers, It Would Never Have Been Changed At All. What I Learned From It Is That Today Seems To Be The Hardest Lesson Of All. I Learned To Love The Journey, Not The Destination. I Learned That It Is Not A Dress Rehearsal, And That Today Is The Only Guarantee You Get. I Learned To Look At All The Good In The World And To Try To Give Some Of It Back Because I Believed In It Completely And Utterly.

Ideas Are Like Pizza Dough, Made To Be Tossed Around, And Nearly Every Book Represents What My Son's Third Grade Teacher Refers To As A "teachable Moment.

When You Leave College, There Are Thousands Of People Out There With The Same Degree You Have; When You Get A Job, There Will Be Thousands Of People Doing What You Want To Do For A Living. But You Are The Only Person Alive Who Has Sole Custody Of Your Life.

Stereotypes Fall In The Face Of Humanity. We Human Beings Are Best Understood One At A Time.

There Are Those Of Us Who Believe That Under Certain Conditions The Cruelest Thing You Can Do To People You Love Is To Force Them To Live. There Are Those Of Us Who Define Living Not By Whether The Heart Beats And The Lungs Lift But Whether The Spirit Is There, Whether The Music Box Plays.

I Don't Have To Listen To The Gospel On Sunday To Know The Stories Of The New Testament. They Inform So Much Of What I Write That They're Practically Like A News Scrim That Goes Through My Brain 24/7.

Loss As Muse. Loss As Character. Loss As Life.

If I Waited Long Enough And Said, "okay, So What You're Saying Is You Liked Your Life A Lot Better When You Were 30?" Everybody Would Get Real Quiet And Then Admit That That Wasn't The Case, That They Really Felt Like They Were Sort Of Growing Into Themselves In A Way.

I Stopped Going To Mass, And Boy, It Was Painful For Me, And It Was Certainly Painful For My Family, But I Just Couldn't Ratify Their Behavior And Their Decisions Anymore By Showing Up On Sundays.

[in The Aftermath Of Death] Small Talk Feels Too Small, Big Talk Too Enormous.

Reporters Are Not Paid To Operate In Retrospect. Because When News Begins To Solidify Into Current Events And Finally Harden Intohistory, It Is The Stories We Didn't Write, The Questions We Didn't Ask That Prove Far, Far More Damaging Than The Ones We Did.

America Is A Country That Seems Forever To Be Toddler Or Teenager, At Those Two Stages Of Human Development Characterized By Conflict Between Autonomy And Security.

The New Testament Has Had A Really Powerful Effect On How I Write And How I Live My Life.

So Much Of What You Take For Granted Is The Bedrock Of Happiness.

No One Thinks Anything Silly Is Suitable When They Are An Adolescent. Such An Enormous Share Of Their Own Behavior Is Silly That They Lose All Proper Perspective On Silliness, Like A Baker Who Is Nauseated By The Sight Of His Own Eclairs. This Provides Another Good Argument For The Emerging Theory That The Best Use Of Cryogenics Is To Freeze All Human Beings When They Are Between The Ages Of Twelve And Nineteen.

I Think The Last Couple Of Years Of Life For Many, Many People Are The Same As They Were 50, 60, 70 Years Ago. They Could Be Really Tough Because Of Infirmity.

God Bless The Physician Who Warms The Speculum Or Holds Your Hand And Looks Into Your Eyes. Perhaps One Subtext Of The Health Caredebate Is A Yen To Be Treated Like A Whole Person, Not Just An Eye, An Ear, A Nose Or A Throat. A Yen To Be Human Again, On The Part Of Patient And Doctor Alike.

Real Friends Offer Both Hard Truths And Soft Landings And Realize That It's Sometimes More Important To Be Nice Than To Be Honest.

Life Is Not So Much About Beginnings And Endings As It Is About Going On And On And On. It Is About Muddling Through The Middle.

And Sometimes You Do Everything Right And Something Bad Just Happens. It's As Simple, And As Scary, As That.

The Great Motherhood Friendships Are The Ones In Which Two Women Can Admit [how Difficult Mothering Is] Quietly To Each Other, Over Cups Of Tea At A Table Sticky With Spilled Apple Juice And Littered With Markers Without Tops.

The Absence On The Panel Of Anyone Who Could Become Pregnant Accidentally Or Discover Her Salary Was Five Thousand Dollars A Yearless Than That Of Her Male Counterpart Meant There Was A Hole In The Consciousness Of The Committee That Empathy, However Welcome, Could Not Entirely Fill.

Amid Attempts To Protect Elephants From Ivory Poachers And Dolphins From Tuna Nets, The Rights Of Children Go Remarkably Unremarked.

It Is Difficult For Me To Imagine The Same Dedication To Women's Rights On The Part Of The Kind Of Man Who Lives In Partnership With Someone He Likes And Respects, And The Kind Of Man Who Considers Breast-augmentation Surgery Self-improvement.

I Do Tend To Be Almost Kind Of Pollyanna-ish Person.

The Women Of My Mother's Generation Had, In The Main, Only One Decision To Make About Their Lives: Who They Would Marry. From That, So Much Else Followed: Where They Would Live, In What Sort Of Conditions, Whether They Would Be Happy Or Sad Or, So Often, A Bit Of Both. There Were Roles And There Were Rules.

The Cairo Conferenceis About A Complicated Web Of Education And Employment, Consumption And Poverty, Development And Health Care. It Is Also About Whether Governments Will Follow Where Women Have So Clearly Led Them, Toward Safe, Simple And Reliable Choices In Family Planning. While Cairo Crackles With Conflict, In The Homes Of The World The Orthodoxies Have Been Duly Heard, And Roundly Ignored.

While Liberals Had Embraced Obama As Someone Who Had Left-wing Progressive Ideas, The Truth Is That By Personality He's A Very Incremental Guy.

However, There Will Be A Republican Party Platform That Will Coalesce Around Their Convention. Unless I Miss My Guess, It Will Be Considerably More Conservative On These Issues, Perhaps Even Than Governor Romney Is, And I Think That That Will Give Americans A Clear Set Of Choices About All Issues, But About Women's Issues Too.

Raising Children Is A Spur-of-the-moment, Seat-of-the-pants Sort Of Deal, As Any Parent Knows, Particularly After An Adult Child Says That His Most Searing Memory Consists Of An Offhand Comment In The Car On The Way To Second Grade That The Parent Cannot Even Dimly Recall.

I Think Americans Suspect, Without Even Being Able To Articulate It, That We're At The End Of The American Century; That We're At The End Of The 100 Or 125 Or 150 Years When We Were The Undisputed Arbiter And Leader Of The World.

I Hadn't Written A Love Story Before And I Hadn't Written A Novel With A Happy Ending Before.

Ideas Are Like Pizza Dough, Made To Be Tossed Around.

Adolescence Is A Tough Time For Parent And Child Alike. It Is A Time Between: Between Childhood And Maturity, Between Parental Protection And Personal Responsibility, Between Life Stage- Managed By Grown-ups And Life Privately Held.

I Always Wanted To Be A Fiction Writer, But I Couldn't Figure Out How You Could Be A Novelist And Make Any Money, Which Continues To Be A Problem For Novelists The World Over.

Maybe Someday It Will Seem Quaint That, During A Time Of Plague, Some Of The Parents Of The 1990s Wanted To Deny Their Children Protection So That They Could Safeguard Their Own Self- Image. Or Maybe We'll Just Seem Like A Bunch Of Lunatics.

I Wondered Why I Hadn't Loved That Day More, Why I Hadn't Savored Every Bit Of It...why I Hadn't Known How Good It Was To Live So Normally, So Everyday. But You Only Know That, I Suppose, After It's Not Normal And Every Day Any Longer.

Sometimes Change Came All At Once, With A Sound Like A Fire Taking Hold Of Dry Wood And Paper, With A Roar That Rose Around You So You Couldn't Hear Yourself Think. And Then, When The Roar Died Down, Even When The Fires Were Damped, Everything Was Different.

My Mother Was An Incredibly Loving Mother.

It Is So Easy To Exist Instead Of Live.

I Like To Say That My Mother Had A Very Ordinary Life. From The Outside It Didn't Look Like There Was Anything Particularly Special Or Wonderful About It, But When You Watch Somebody Hold On To That Life With Both Hands, It Makes You Think That Life Must Be Pretty Damn Good.

It's Only Before Realities Set In That We Can Treasure Our Delusions.

The 1992 Us Olympic Basketball Team Is The Best Sports Team Ever, The Equivalent Of Rounding Up The Greatest American Writers Of The Last Century Or So And Watching Them Collaborate: 'ok, Twain, You Do The Dialogue And Hand Off To Faulkner. He'll Do The Interior Monologue. Hemingway Will Edit - No, Don't Make That Face, You Know You Overwrite. And Be Nice To Cheever. He's Young, But He's Got A Good Ear. Wharton And Cather Can't Play - They're Girls.'

Here Is The Real Domino Theory - Gay Man To Gay Man, Bisexual Man To Straight Woman, Addict Mother To Newborn Baby, They All Fall Down And Someday It Will Come To You.

I Can't Think Of A Single Downside To Motherhood Now.

Consider The Lilies Of The Field. Look At The Fuzz On A Baby's Ear. Read In The Backyard With The Sun On Your Face. Learn To Be Happy. And Think Of Life As A Terminal Illness Because If You Do You Will Live It With Joy And Passion, As It Ought To Be Lived.

I Remember Adolescence, The Years Of Having The Impulse Control Of A Mousetrap, Of Being As Private As A Safe-deposit Box.

Impulse Control

A Week In The Hospital She Had Told Us. A Hysterectomy, She Had Said. It Had Seemed Unremarkable To Me In A Woman Of Forty-six Long Finished With Childbearing, Although Every Day That I Grow Older I Realize There Is Never Anything Unremarkable About Losing Any Part Of What Makes You Female - A Breast, A Womb, A Child, A Man.

The Thing That Is Really Hard, And Really Amazing, Is Giving Up On Being Perfect And Beginning The Work Of Becoming Yourself.

I Read And Walked For Miles At Night Along The Beach, Writing Bad Blank Verse And Searching Endlessly For Someone Wonderful Who Would Step Out Of The Darkness And Change My Life. It Never Crossed My Mind That That Person Could Be Me.

Over The Last Twenty Years, We've Changed The World Just Enough To Make It Radically Different, But Not Enough To Make It Work.

If You Want Something, It Will Elude You. If You Do Not Want Something, You Will Get Ten Of It In The Mail.

What Had I Expected Of The First Child? Everything. Rocket Scientist. Neurosurgeon. Designated Hitter. We Talked Wisely At Cocktail Parties About The Sad Mistake Our Mothers Had Made In Pinning All Their Hopes And Dreams On Us. We Were Full Of It.

I Don't Do Research For My Novels. Obviously, In My Other Line Of Work As A Reporter And A Columnist, I've Had The Opportunity To Get To Know Both Social Workers And Tv Talk-show Hosts.

All The Things We Don’t Say, All The Words We Swallow, And It Makes Nothing But Trouble.

Socialized Medicine, Some Still Cry, But It's Long Been Socialized, With Those Covered Paying For Those Who Are Underinsured. American Medicine Is Simply Socialized Badly, Penny Wise And Pound Foolish.

When Children Are Small, Parents Should Run Their Lives And Not The Other Way Around.

It Would Take A Helluva Man To Replace No Man At All.

If I Had To Guess What The New Etch-a-sketch Picture Is Going To Be Like, It's Going To Be Considerably Less To The Right. Romney Has Backed Himself Into A Couple Of Corners That I Don't Think Will Serve Him Well In The General Election, The Main One Being Very Harsh Stands On Immigration, Which I Think Are Not Only Short-sighted But To My Mind Immoral.

I Sort Of Feel Like It Comes Around Again. That When You Get To A Certain Age, When You've Lived Enough And You've Got Your Friends To Support You And Your Family To Support You, You Wake Up One Morning And Think, Yeah, I'm Okay.

But It's Important, While We Are Supporting Lessons In Respecting Others, To Remember That Many Of Our Youngest Kids Need To Learn To Respect Themselves. You Learn Your Worth From The Way You Are Treated.

Women Who Marry Early Are Often Overly Enamored Of The Kind Of Man Who Looks Great In Wedding Pictures And Passes The Maid Of Honor His Telephone Number.

I Grew Up In The Suburbs Of Philadelphia And One Of The Things I Like To Say Is That One Of The Biggest Impediments I Had To Becoming A Successful Writer Is I Had A Very Happy Childhood.

She Say Guilt Is A Useless Emotion." "oh, Please," Says Nancy. "guilt Is What Separates Humans From Animals.

I'm Boggled By The Idea Of Being An Only Child. I Know Nothing At All (i'm Happy To Say) About Having Had A Cold And Withholding Mother, About Being Divorced. The More I've Been Writing Novels, Each Novel I've Written Has Become Successively Less Grounded In Anything Approaching Autobiography.

Fashions In Bigotry Come And Go. The Right Thing Lasts.

When An Actress Takes Off Her Clothes Onscreen But A Nursing Mother Is Told To Leave, What Message Do We Send About The Roles Of Women?

You Want To Have Fun With Your Kids, And No One Has Fun With Someone Who Runs Roughshod.

The Gender Gap Looks At This Point Like It's Going To Favor The President, Particularly Among White Suburban Women. I Certainly Think It's Going To Be An Issue. But I Think The Single Most Important Thing In This Election Will Be Turnout.

We Take Our Vitamins, We Go To Exercise Class, We Put On Our Seat Belts. And Then Something Blindsides Us And Gives The Lie To Our Carefully Constructed Facade Of Safety.

The Problem... Is Emblematic Of What Hasn't Changed During The Equal Opportunity Revolution Of The Last 20 Years. Doors Opened; Opportunities Evolved. Law, Institutions, Corporations Moved Forward. But Many Minds Did Not.

Familiarity Breeds Content.

When I Write A Novel, I Have What I Think Of As An Icon That Helps Get Me Into The World Of The Book.

Recently A Young Mother Asked For Advice. What, She Wanted To Know, Was She To Do With A 7-year-old Who Was Obstreperous, Outspoken, And Inconveniently Willful? "keep Her," I Replied.... The Suffragettes Refused To Be Polite In Demanding What They Wanted Or Grateful For Getting What They Deserved. Works For Me.

I Think One Of The Hardest Things About Doing A Book In The First Person Is That To A Certain Extent Each Day, When You Begin To Do Your Work, You're Climbing Into Somebody Else's Skin.

If God Is Watching Us, As Some Believers Suggest, As Though We Were A Television Show And God Had A Lot Of Free Time, The Deity Would Surely Be Bemused By How Dumbed-down Devotion Has Sometimes Become In This So-called Modern Era. How Might An Omnipotent Being With The Long View Of History Respond To Those Who Visit The Traveling Exhibit Of A Grilled-cheese Sandwich, Sold On Ebay, That Is Said To Bear The Image Of The Virgin Mary? It Certainly Argues Against Intelligent Design, Or At Least Intelligent Design In Humans.

Cheese Sandwiches

A Writer Is Always Working With Whatever She's Managed To Store In The Brainpan Or Puzzle Out About The World.

If Men Got Pregnant, There Would Be Safe, Reliable Methods Of Birth Control. They'd Be Cheap, Too.

The More Humdrum Aspects Of Life Do Not Make For Gripping Reading. To Render Them Compelling, A Writer Must Describe The Universal In Eloquent And Evocative Prose. Alas, Frey's Writing Suggests That This Was Not An Option, And He Came Up With Something Else.

Now, A Lot Of People Are Challenged By The Fact That A Record Number Of People In Their Sixties Have Living Parents, And A Record Number Of People In Their Sixties Have Kids Who May Still Depend Upon Them.

The Truth About Your Own Life Is Not Always Easy To Accept, And Sometimes Hasn't Even Occurred To You.

Today Is The Only Guarantee You Get.

All Of Life Like A Series Of Tableaux, And In The Living We Missed So Much, Hid So Much, Left So Much Undone And Unsaid.

[i]n Contrast To The Common Belief That They Are The World's Greatest Cynics, The Best Journalists Are The World's Great Idealists. They Have Experienced Firsthand The Great Soothing Balance Of Human Existence. For Every Disgrace There Is Triumph, For Every Wrong There Is A Moment Of Justice, For Every Funeral A Wedding, For Every Obituary A Birth Announcement.

Parents Have Railed Against Shelters Near Schools, But No One Has Made Any Connection Between The Crazed Consumerism Of Our Kids And Their Elders' Cold Unconcern Toward Others. Maybe The Homeless Are Not The Only Ones Who Need To Spend Time In These Places To Thaw Out.

I Think What Saved Me, As A Writer, Is That There Are Really Two Breaking Points In My Life. One Was When I Was 19 And My Mother Died, And One Was When I Was 31 And My First Child Was Born. And That Sort Of Gave Me A Kind Of Rebirth That I Think Has Been Invaluable To Me As A Novelist, In Terms Of Seeing The World Anew.

I Conveniently Forgot To Remember That People Only Have Two Hands, Or, As Another Parent Once Said Of Having A Third Child, It's Time For A Zone Defense Instead Of Man-to-man.

I Never Think About Issues When I'm Working On A Novel. Issues Are Things That Happen To People In Sufficient Numbers To Elicit Widespread Attention; In Other Words, They're Just Life Happening. That's What I Think About: Life, And Telling A Story.

The Clearest Explanation For The Failure Of Any Marriage Is That The Two People Are Incompatible; That Is, That One Is Male And The Other Female.

I Do Get A Sense That There's A Huge Disconnect Between The Political Powers And What's Really Happening, So Right-wing Conservatives Can Talk About Contraception All They Want, But The Women Of America Are Using Birth Control. It's As Simple As That.

I Got A Fortune Cookie That Said, "to Remember Is To Understand." I Have Never Forgotten It. A Good Judge Remembers What It Was Like To Be A Lawyer. A Good Editor Remembers Being A Writer. A Good Parent Remembers What It Was Like To Be A Child.

Being A Parent Is Not Transaction ... We Do Not Get What We Give. It Is The Ultimate Pay-it-forward Endeavor: We Are Good Parents Not So They Will Be Loving Enough To Stay With Us But So They Will Be Strong Enough To Leave Us.

The Church Does An Enormous Amount Of Good, And It Carries One Of The Most Valuable Messages Imaginable - That You Should Love Your Neighbor As Yourself, And That If You Have Two Coats You Should Give One To The Man Who Has None.

The Most Sacred Business Of Judges Is Not To Ratify The Will Of The Majority But To Protect The Minority From Its Tyranny.

It's What The Taliban Does In Afghanistan, It's What Gets Done In The Middle East, And It's Clearly Something That Certain Mainly Conservative Groups In The United States Would Like To Do. They Miss The Good Old Days, When Men Were Men And Women Were Nothing.

If There Is Anyone Who's Living The Work Of The New Testament, It's The Nuns Of The Catholic Church And Not The Catholic Hierarchy.

Writing Seems To Be The Only Profession People Imagine You Can Do By Thinking About Doing It.

All Parents Should Be Aware That When They Mock Or Curse Gay People, They May Be Mocking Or Cursing Their Own Child.

Let Me Say First That Reading Is My Favorite Pastime, Bar None. If I Couldn't Read, I Don't Know What I'd Do. But As A Writer, It's Both A Blessing And A Curse. You Absorb Technique As You Go Along.

I Did Not Read From A Sense Of Superiority, Or Advancement, Or Even Learning. I Read Because I Loved It More Than Any Other Activity On Earth.

Reading Is Not Simply An Intellectual Pursuit But An Emotional And Spiritual One. It Lights The Candle In The Hurricane Lamp Of Self; That's Why It Survives

And Yet We Constantly Reclaim Some Part Of That Primal Spontaneity Through The Youngest Among Us, Not Only Through Their Sorrow And Anger But Simply Through Everyday Discoveries, Life Unwrapped. To See A Child Touch The Piano Keys For The First Time, To Watch A Small Body Slice Through The Surface Of The Water In A Clean Dive, Is To Experience The Shock, Not Of The New, But Of The Familiar Revisited As Though It Were Strange And Wonderful.

People Always Blame The Girl; She Should Have Said No. A Monosyllable, But Conventional Wisdom Has Always Been That Boys Can't Manage It.

[after My Mother Died, I Had A Feeling That Was] Not Unlike The Homesickness That Always Filled Me For The First Few Days When I Went To Stay At My Grandparents'' House, And Even, I Was Stunned To Discover, During The First Few Months Of My Freshman Year At College. It Was Not Really The Home My Mother Had Made That I Yearned For. But I Was Sick In My Soul For That Greater Meaning Of Home That We Understand Most Purely When We Are Children, When It Is A Metaphor For All Possible Feelings Of Security, Of Safety, Of What Is Predictable, Gentle, And Good In Life.

I Learned That If I Ever Claim Sexual Harassment, I Will Be Confronted With Every Bozo I Once Dated, Every Women I Once Impressedas Snotty And Superior, And Together They Will Provide A Convenient Excuse To Disbelieve Me.

I've Been A Feminist Since I Was A Teenager, But Originally It Was Because I Wanted To Make The World A Better Place For Me.

Life Is Made Up Of Moments, Small Pieces Of Glittering Mica In A Long Stretch Of Gray Cement. It Would Be Wonderful If They Came To Us Unsummoned, But Particularly In Lives As Busy As The Ones Most Of Us Lead Now, That Won’t Happen. We Have To Teach Ourselves How To Make Room For Them, To Love Them, And To Live, Really Live.

I Am A Good Friend To My Husband. I Have Tried To Make My Marriage Vows Mean What They Say. I Show Up. I Listen. I Try To Laugh.

Anyone Who Has Breast-fed Knows Two Things For Sure: The Baby Wants To Be Fed At The Most Inopportune Times, In The Most Inopportune Places, And The Baby Will Prevail.... And So The Baby Should, And The Mom, Too. Sometimes A Breast Is A Sexual Object, And Sometimes It's A Food Delivery System, And One Need Not Preclude Nor Color The Other.

Jail Sentences Have Many Functions, But One Is Surely To Send A Message About What Our Society Abhors And What It Values. This Week, The Equation Was Twofold: Female Infidelity Twice As Bad As Male Abuse, The Life Of A Woman Half As Valuable As That Of A Man. The Killing Of The Woman Taken In Adultery Has A Long History And Survives Today In Many Cultures. One Of Those Is Our Own.

I Had That Feeling You Have When You're Watching A Sad Movie, Sobbing At The Heartbreak You Are Feeling At The Same Time That You Know The Heartbreak Isn't Exactly Real, That It Will Be Gone By The Time You Get Home And Make A Cup Of Tea. I Found A Lot Of Life Like That When I Was Younger, As Though I Was Practicing For What Came Later.

I Don't Understand How People Learn To Live In The World If They Haven't Had Siblings. Everything I Learned About Negotiation, Territoriality, Coexistence, Dislike, Inbred Differences And Love Despite Knowledge I Learned From My Four Younger Siblings.

Trying To Be Perfect May Be Inevitable For People Who Are Smart And Ambitious And Interested In The World And Its Good Opinion...what Is Really Hard, And Really Amazing, Is Giving Up On Being Perfect And Beginning The Work Of Becoming Yourself.

I'm Always Keeping An Eye On The Court. Also, When The Members Of Congress Came To His Office During The Budget Debacle Of A Year And A Half Back And Said, "we Want To De-fund Planned Parenthood," He Said, "not Going To Happen." Those Apparently Were More Or Less His Exact Words.

I Think That We Really Fool Ourselves About Our Ability To Be Safe And Secure Nowadays.

But While Ignorance Can Make You Insensitive, Familiarity Can Also Numb. Entering The Second Half-century Of An Information Age, Our Cumulative Knowledge Has Changed The Level Of What Appalls, What Stuns, What Shocks.

I Realized That, While I Would Never Be My Mother Nor Have Her Life, The Lesson She Had Left Me Was That It Was Possible To Love And Care For A Man And Still Have At Your Core A Strength So Great That You Never Even Needed To Put It On Display.

I Don't Know What I Would Do In The World Without [female Friends] For Advice, For Comfort, For Simply Knowing That There Is Someone Out There Who Knows Me As I Am, And Loves Me Despite And Because Of It.

Jane Austen May Not Be The Best Writer, But She Certainly Writes About The Best People. And By That I Mean People Just Like Me.

Figuring Out Who You Are Is The Whole Point Of The Human Experience.

As I Said, I Had This Fabulous College Education. At College I Met The Man To Whom I've Been Married For 34 Years And Who Is The Father Of Those Three Kids. I Seriously Considered Going To Another College, And My Life Would Have Been Completely Different In Every Way.

A Finished Person Is A Boring Person.

I Believe That In A Contest Between The Living And The Almost Living, The Latter Must, If Necessary, Give Way To The Will Of The Former.

I Was Doing The Family Grocery Shopping Accompanied By Two Children, An Event I Hope To See Included In The Olympics In The Near Future.

I Think I'm Like Most Novelists In That My Books Have Gotten Farther And Farther Away From Autobiography The Longer I've Been Writing Them.

Raising A Child Is A Little Like Picasso's Work; In The Beginning He Did Very Conventional Representational Things. Cubism Came After He Had The Rules Down Pat.

My Father Expected His First Child To Be A Boy, And When It Didn't Turn Out That Way He Didn't Let The Fact Get In The Way Of A Good Story.

Reading Has Always Been My Home, My Sustenance, My Great Invincible Companion. "book Love," Trollope Called It. "it Will Make Your Hours Pleasant To You As Long As You Live." Yet Of All The Many Things In Which We Recognize Some Universal Comfort...reading Seems To Be The One In Which The Comfort Is Most Undersung.

Keeping Kids Safe Is Sometimes A Delusion. The World Is A Perilous Place. Sometimes The Kitchen Is A Perilous Place.

Life Is So Messy That The Temptation To Straighten It Up Is Very Strong. And The Results Always Illusory.

When You Really Want To Say No, Say No. You Can't Do Everything - Or At Least Not Well.

I Think There Was A Long Period Of Time When We Got Real Invested In A Youth Culture, And Not Coincidentally It Was When The Baby Boomers, Who Let's Face It, Take Up A Lot Of Space On The Planet, Were Young.

You're Like A Cake When You're Young. You Can't Rush It Or It Will Fall, Or Just Turn Out Wrong. Rising Takes Patience, And Heat.

I Would Be The Most Content If My Children Grew Up To Be The Kind Of People Who Think Decorating Consists Mostly Of Building Enough Bookshelves.

Independent Bookstores

I Learned To Love The Journey, Not The Destination. I Learned That This Is Not A Dress Rehearsal, And That Today Is The Only Guarantee You Get.

The Beginning And The End Are Never Really The Journey Of Discovery For Me. It Is The Middle That Remains A Puzzle Until Well Into The Writing. That's How Life Is Most Of The Time, Isn't It? You Know Where You Are And Where You Hope To Wind Up. It's The Getting There That's Challenging.

Acts Of Bravery Don't Always Take Place On Battlefields. They Can Take Place In Your Heart, When You Have The Courage To Honor Your Character, Your Intellect, Your Inclinations, And Yes, Your Soul By Listening To Its Clean, Clear Voice Of Direction Instead Of Following The Muddied Messages Of A Timid World.

We've Made Hyper Motherhood A Measure Of Female Success.

That's Really What I Want In A Leader; I Want Somebody Who's Really, Really Smart.

Well, We Tell Our Kids Things Like 'don't Gossip' And Then An Hour Later They Hear Us On The Phone. Stuff Like That.

Those Of Us Who Read Because We Love It More Than Anything, Who Feel About Bookstores The Way Some People Feel About Jewelers.

More Than A Decade After Our Fellow Citizens Began Bedding Down On The Sidewalks, Their Problems Continue To Seem So Intractable That We Have Begun To Do Psychologically What Government Has Been Incapable Of Doing Programmatically. We Bring The Numbers Down--not By Solving The Problem, But By Deciding It's Their Own Damn Fault.

I Don't Really Read What People Write About Me. Someone Gives My Novel One Star; Are They A Troll? Are They Someone Who Hates My Politics And So Has Decided To Do That?

The Dark Aftermath Of The Frontier, Of The Vast Promise Of Possibility This Country First Offered, Is An Inflated Sense Of American Entitlement Today. We Want What We Want, And We Want It Now. Easy Credit. Fast Food. A Straight Shot Down The Interstate From Point A To Point B. The Endless Highway Is Crowded With The Kinds Of Cars Large Enough To Take A Mountain Pass In High Snow. Instead They Are Used To Take Children From Soccer Practice To Pizza Hut. In The Process They Burn Fuel Like There's No Tomorrow. Tomorrow's Coming.

Ideas Are Only Lethal If You Suppress And Don't Discuss Them. Ignorance Is Not Bliss, It's Stupid. Banning Books Shows You Don't Trust Your Kids To Think And You Don't Trust Yourself To Be Able To Talk To Them.

I'm Not Making Light Of Prayers Here, But Of So-called School Prayer, Which Bears As Much Resemblance To Real Spiritual Experienceas That Freeze-dried Astronaut Food Bears To A Nice Standing Rib Roast. From What I Remember Of Praying In School, It Was Almost An Insult To God, A Rote Exercise In Moving Your Mouth While Daydreaming Or Checking Out The Cutest Boy In The Seventh Grade That Was A Far, Far Cry From Soul-searching.

Like Cellulite Creams Or Hair-loss Tonics, Capital Punishment Is One Of Those Panaceas That Isn't. Only It Costs A Whole Lot More.

In The Same Way The Brits Had To Get Used To The Idea That The Sun Had Set On The British Empire, I Think That There's The Subrosa Feeling That We Are At The End Of The American Century, And I Think That's Very, Very Hard For Americans To Take.

You Just Can't Tell Or Calibrate Motive Or Intelligence Or Sense. So I Don't Read Anything Unless Someone Tells Me That It's Really Smart Or Illuminating. I Don't Read Any Reviews Anymore And It's Been Really Liberating.

There Is A Little Boy Inside The Man Who Is My Brother... Oh, How I Hated That Little Boy. And How I Love Him Too.

The Purse Is The Mirror Of The Soul.

I Really Feel Like I'm A Liberal Because I'm A Catholic, Because I Took The Words Of The New Testament To Heart.

I Think We Now Know The Limits Also Of Intelligence And Rhetoric.

Catastrophe Is Numerical. Loss Is Singular, One Beloved At A Time.

Behind Every Door In London There Are Stories, Behind Every One Ghosts. The Greatest Writers In The History Of The Written Word Have Given Them Substance, Given Them Life. And So We Readers Walk, And Dream, And Imagine, In The City Where Imagination Found Its Great Home.

New York Is A City Where It's Particularly Hard To Be Poor, Not Only Because Everything Costs Twice As Much As It Does Elsewhere But Because Over-the-top Affluence Is Part Of Its Identity.

One Of The Things That Got Me On This Topic For This Book Was That When I Was Researching The Column I Wrote In 2009 Saying That I Was Stepping Down From My Column At "newsweek" Because I Wanted To Make Room For Newer, Fresh Voices Out There, I Discovered That In The Year I Was Born, 1952, The Average Life Expectancy Of An American Was 68. I Was Shocked By That Figure And Every Time I Mention It I Hear A Gasp From Somebody In The Crowd. Now, Of Course, We're More Or Less At 80, So That Means That We've Gotten 12 Additional Years.

It Often Seems, Looking Back, That The Unexpected Comes To Define Us, The Paths We Didn't See Coming And May Have Wandered Down By Mistake. The Older We Get The More Willing We Are To Follow Those, To Surprise Ourselves.

February Is A Suitable Month For Dying. Everything Around Is Dead, The Trees Black And Frozen So That The Appearance Of Green Shoots Two Months Hence Seems Preposterous, The Ground Hard And Cold, The Snow Dirty, The Winter Hateful, Hanging On Too Long.

You Write To Suit Some Sense In Yourself And Trust That That Will Resonate With A Certain Wider Readership.

Well, I'd Like To Think I Am, And I'd Also Like To Think That We're All Having A Lot More Fun Getting Older Than We Pretend. It Was Interesting To Me When I First Started Working On This Book That I'd Mentioned That I Was Writing A Memoir About Aging And Everybody Would Moan And Groan And Carry On.

We Don't Do Ambivalence Well In America. We Do Courage Of Our Convictions. We Do Might Makes Right. Ambivalence Is French. Certainty Is American.

Sometimes We Don't See Out Of Our Peripheral Vision What's Coming Right Around The Corner.

Part Of The Problem With A War On Poverty Today Is That Many Americans Have Decided That Being Poor Is A Character Defect, Not An Economic Condition.

The Closest Thing To An Outline Is, Because My Memory Is So Bad Now, If Something Occurs To Me That I Think Might Be Important Or Pivotal, A Lot Of Times I'll Scribble Notes Down Somewhere Until I Can Get Back To The Book. Of Course Half The Time I Look At Those Notes The Next Morning And Think, "what Was That About?"

A Life Of Unremitting Caution, Without The Carefree - Or Even, Occasionally, The Careless - May Turn Out To Be Half A Life.

It's Important To Remember That Feminism Is No Longer A Group Of Organizations Or Leaders. It's The Expectations That Parents Have For Their Daughters, And Their Sons, Too. It's The Way We Talk About And Treat One Another. It's Who Makes The Money And Who Makes The Compromises And Who Makes Dinner. It's A State Of Mind. It's The Way We Live Now.

When Hot Dogs Like Mr. D'amato Or The Republican Apologist Roger Ailes Say That Whitewater Is Worse Than Watergate, It's Because They're Suffering From A Disease. It's Called Bull-imia, And It's The Regurgitation Of Patent Hyperbole.

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