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 ….

The world is full of women blindsided by the unceasing demands of motherhood, still flabbergasted by how a job can be terrific andtorturous, involvin….

Jason Oliver C. Smith, a big dumb guy who was tan, died March 30 of lung cancer and old age. He was 13 years old and lived in New Jersey, Pennsylvani….

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 ….

A life of unremitting caution, without the carefree - or even, occasionally, the careless - may turn out to be half a life..

I know the difference now between dedication and infatuation. That doesn't mean I don't still get an enormous kick out of infatuation;: the exciting ….

Every reader, I suspect, has a book like this somewhere in his or her past, a book that seemed to hold within it, at that moment, all the mysteries o….

Ethnic stereotypes are misshapen pearls, sometimes with a sandy grain of truth at their center. ... but they ignore complexity, change, and individua….

There are obvious places in which government can narrow the chasm between haves and have-nots. One is the public schools, which have been seen as the….

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 th….

I think the gift of my mother's death, if anything so terrible can be said to have an upside to it, is that I was always keenly aware that life was f….

I think that after a while you realize that your husband can't be all things to you and certainly you don't want the kids to be all things to you, be….

I think books in which people are really happy and things are going well are probably the most challenging novels there are to write, and there are v….

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 ….

Look back, to slavery, to suffrage, to integration and one thing is clear. Fashions in bigotry come and go. The right thing lasts..

When you look at the women that have made a real difference in the world throughout history, what they’ve done has almost always been defined by fear….

People who wish to salute the free and independent side of their evolutionary character acquire cats. People who wish to pay homage to their servile ….

Not writing at all leads to nothing..

I'm writing this memoir from the perspective of somebody who's prosperous and has means. Having said that, one of the things that I think I discovere….

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..