No one sits on the stoop when she's a kid and thinks, 'I want to be a biographer when I grow up,'

parenting is an exercise in unintended consequences.

As always, an educated woman was a dangerous woman.

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

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.

You never know whose tough day you will brighten with a few kind words. Tweet your positivity today!

Prayer is meeting with God. It's checking in, saying I am here, You are here. It is the present moment.

Life is too short, and sometimes brutal, and in the end we have only each other... Nothing else matters.

It isn't what happens that is important . . . it's how you deal with it Always J T Coombes Global Magna Carta Returning Power to teh 99% . . . If they want it!

Divorce is a fire exit. When a house is burning, it doesn’t matter who set the fire. If there is no fire exit, everyone in the house will be burned!

Only to the rational animal is it given to follow voluntarily what happens; but simply to follow is a necessity imposed on all.

A reaction, to be pleasant, must be simple.

Simply put, killing healthy or treatable animals is immoral.

Jesus was a pothead- long hair, beard, sandals, carpenter- do the math it all adds up. Living with twelve guys with no visible means of support.

Drinking beer in a children's playground is an old Soviet tradition.