The professor counsels against retrospective history, assuming that particular pieces contributed to an outcome.

Manners matter, asserts the professor. What provokes rebellion, he asserts, is not as often a theory out allowing for arbitrary power but be excessive, brusque use of it by a particular individual.

As a general rule, if anyone ever asks you to put stockings on a ninety-year old deceased Romanian woman with oedema, your answer should be no.

Love gives us a heightened consciousness through which to apprehend the world, but anger gives us a precise, detached perception of its own.

Men were springing up, a black avenging host was slowly germinating in the furrows, thrusting upward for the harvests of future ages. And very soon their germination would crack the earth asunder.

Being in love with someone who doesn't love you back is a tragedy. A fantasy is having someone understand the real you and love you anyway.

You think about child abuse and you think of a father viciously attacking a daughter or a son, but in my family it was my mother. My mother, I would say, was a... very brutal disciplinarian.

One of the benefits of being divorced is that you no longer need to listen to your ex's assessment of the appropriateness of your actions.

Life divides into amazing enjoyable times and appalling experiences that will make future amazing anecdotes.

I am such a political person.

Cushion the painful effects of hard blows by keeping the enthusiasm going strong, even if doing so requires struggle.

I have a work ethic. If I say I'm going to do something, I do it.