A rich, multi-dimensional tour of Naples, most brilliant, battered, and bewildering of cities, here fixed to the page with wit and élan. Splendid.

parenting is an exercise in unintended consequences.

As always, an educated woman was a dangerous woman.

I'm a sucker for lost worlds. I was nostalgic even as a child. I was happiest in my hometown library in Adams, Mass., where nothing seemed to change.

When a woman teams up with a snake a moral storm threatens somewhere.

And in the absence of facts, myth rushes in, the kudzu of history.

An interesting thing about book groups, it seems to me, is that there is no correlation between a brilliant book and a brilliant discussion. The first seems sometimes even to undermine the second.

Motherhood is always an act of courage.

My next book is on the Salem witch trials. As a small-town Massachusetts girl, this makes me very happy. So does the reunion with documents!

No one in the modern world controls the wealth or territory that Cleopatra did.

Ancient history is oddly short on incorrect omens.

Sometimes life appears one way, but what matters is how you internalize life and its lessons.

If you want to eat well in England, eat three breakfasts.

If I spray it on the seat, lady gonna tie a big knot in the meat.

I love to sit and watch people. I love to sit and listen to people.

Taoism is the gentle way. The path of least resistence.

It is death that goes down to the center of the earth, the great burial church the earth is, and then to the curved ends of the universe, as light is said to do

Rashness is the faithful, but unhappy parent of misfortune.

There have to be at least two copies of a photograph, otherwise it’s not a photograph.

If we pick out which parts of the Bible we dislike, we actually have a god we've created. How can that god ever call you out on anything?

My mother refused to let me fail. So I insisted.