“For Christmas 1999, my husband surprised me with a trip to Disney World. Along with our boys, we were standing on the roof of the Contemporary Hotel at midnight on New Year's Eve 2000 watching fire...”

“I grew up with three little brothers. Every Christmas, we'd have piles of toy trucks and Lincoln Logs and G.I. Joes under the tree. Those were for them. For me? My No. 1 favorite present of all tim...”

“I see them standing at the formal gates of their colleges,I see my father strolling outunder the ochre sandstone arch, thered tiles glinting like bentplates of blood behind his head, Isee my mother...”

“We realized that the version of the world they rendered for us was not the world they really believed in...”

“Id never heard my parents make love. If they made love, they did it silently, like bank robbers, like surgeons.”

“The waste of capital, in proportion to the total capital, in this country between 1800 and 1850, in the attempts which were made to establish means of communication and transportation, was enormous.”

“I think the internal combustion engine will disappear from the streets of our cities in the next thirty years because transportation will be mass transportation, or probably electrical power.”