successful parenting was like log rolling, and she'd often landed in the drink.

Any mother could perform the jobs of several air-traffic controllers with ease.

That's the risk you take if you change: that people you've been involved with won't like the new you. But other people who do will come along.

Just as you began to feel that you could make good use of time, there was no time left to you.

A snake will always be a snake, even if you put a chain around its neck and try to make it walk upright.

Inspiration never arrived when you were searching for it.

One didn't issue instructions to comets. Grown children did what they had to do, and parents could only grit their teeth and watch and pray for them to get through it.

What a surprise to find you could shift the contents of your head like rearranging furniture in a room.

If this was adulthood the only improvement she could detect in her situation was that she could now eat dessert without eating her vegetables.

The requirements of romantic love are difficult to satisfy in the back seat of a Dodge Dart.

Dying was apparently a weaning process; all the attachments to familiar people and objects have to be undone.

Life is like a magnet: success attracts and failure repels.

When we challenge ourselves with goals requiring us to stretch beyond previous accomplishments, we become more sensitive to our true potential.

If we were logical, the future would be bleak, indeed. But we are more than logical. We are human beings, and we have faith, and we have hope, and we can work.

I refuse to allow prejudice to defeat me.

Don't be silly. I'll write you twice a week.

[Charles] Darwin, for example, is the one who made us face the fact that the primary way we tell the Christ story doesn't work anymore.

In the end, like the Almighty Himself, we make everything in our image, for want of a more reliable model; our artifacts tell more about ourselves than our confessions.

I am always surprised at what movie studios think people will want to see. I'm even more surprised at how often they are correct.

when you get a good night's sleep and wake up ready to produce throughout the day.

It is not the reporter's job to be a patriot or to presume to determine where patriotism lies. His job is to relate the facts.