“The big question about the American depression is not whether war with Germany and Japan ended it. It is why the Depression lasted until that war. From 1929 to 1940, from Hoover to Roosevelt, gover...”

“The donning of the ear buds marks the beginning of teen life, when children set off on their own for the passage through adolescence.”

“There's something unsettling about the education of a child who comfortably enumerates the rules for surviving zombie apocalypse but finds it uncomfortable to enumerate the rules of his grandparent...”

“Anything can be done if you find friends to do it with. The lucky biographers find themselves drawn into a sort of friendship with their subject.”

“The phrase 'perception is reality' is overused generally. But perception can be reality in monetary policy. The bond market doesn't act merely on what it sees. It acts on what it expects of the Fed...”

“With demands for special education or standardized test prep being shouted in their ears, public schools can't always hear a parent when he says: 'I want my child to be able to write contracts in S...”

“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 problem of society is that they use a single word to describe you.”

“Beastliness means taking that is unrightful [of someones else right], eating that is unrightful, thinking of accumulating things which is unrightful [not of ones own right]. There is no problem in ...”

“The only problem is time.”