Nobody understands anyone 18, including those who are 18.

Watching your daughter being collected by her date feels like handing over a million dollar Stradivarius to a gorilla.

A good writer is not, per se, a good book critic. No more so than a good drunk is automatically a good bartender.

The future is an opaque mirror. Anyone who tries to look into it sees nothing but the dim outlines of an old and worried face.

Archaeology is the peeping Tom of the sciences. It is the sandbox of men who care not where they are going; they merely want to know where everyone else has been.

Nothing is as far away as one minute ago.

Autumn carries more gold in its pocket than all the other seasons.

Golf is played by twenty million mature American men whose wives think they are out having fun.

Books, I found, had the power to make time stand still, retreat or fly into the future.

It is difficult to live in the present, ridiculous to live in the future, and impossible to live in the past. Nothing is as far away as one minute ago.

Mulligan: invented by an Irishman who wanted to hit one more twenty yard grounder.

Focus! (said a voice within me). We are here to craft emotions. To become a better person. Not to waste our serenity on someone who had a poor upbringing and are not taught manners.

I simply needed to excavate passion lost by being resilient, resolving the blockages, and healing. As soon as I did, the passion, and joy, burst forth.

My parents were both Spanish-speakers and they used to speak to me and my siblings in Spanish and we'd answer them in English.

This is not a reaction against a negative world. It's a response to a negative world.

A love story - your own, or anyone else's - is interior, hidden. It can never be accurately reported, only imagined. It is all dreams and invention. It's guesswork.

I wake up every day trying to give something back to you that you can rock to and be proud of.

My heart beats as much as I can breathe.

Do not focus on being happy, focus on doing something useful; afterwards, happiness will flow towards you!

Because that, more than any monster, was what Sam had feared: that he was weak and cowardly. He had a terrible fear of being afraid.

The family is in flux, and signs of trouble are widespread. Expectations remain high. But realities are disturbing.