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 ….

Reporters are not paid to operate in retrospect. Because when news begins to solidify into current events and finally harden intohistory, it is the s….

I was very driven, very focused, very ambitious. I mean, when I look back on myself in my 20s, part of me just cringes..

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….

When I write a novel, I have what I think of as an icon that helps get me into the world of the book..

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..

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?.

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 chi….

I think when people keep saying to you, "You're good at this," you just keep doing it..

On social welfare the Church does so much good around the world - nuns running schools and homeless shelters, priests ministering to people who are i….

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 s….

We read in bed because reading is halfway between life and dreaming, our own consciousness in someone else's mind..

Fifty years ago, teachers said their top discipline problems were talking, chewing gum, making noise, and running in the halls. The current list, by ….

My child looked at me and I looked back at him in the delivery room, and I realized that out of a sea of infinite possibilities it had come down to t….

Ignorant free speech often works against the speaker. That is one of several reasons why it must be given rein instead of suppressed..

Real friends offer both hard truths and soft landings and realize that it's sometimes more important to be nice than to be honest..

Our love of lockstep is our greatest curse, the source of all that bedevils us. It is the source of homophobia, xenophobia, racism, sexism, terrorism….

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 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..

By the time you kill and mount what you catch, it has lost that very thing that made it worth having. I knew this only as a vague sense of disappoint….

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 ….