“The two things I was positive about in life were that I was going to be a teacher at a boarding school or an operative with the CIA posted abroad. I could write a book about all the things I was su...”

“I was up late last night yapping about the elections on CNN and up early this morning doing the same thing in my daughter's kindergarten class.”

“The second you think that all your good fortune is a product of your virtue, you become highly judgmental, lacking empathy, totally without self-awareness, arrogant, stupid - I mean, all the stuff ...”

“I have no way of knowing how people really feel, but the vast majority of those I meet couldn't be nicer. Every once in a while someone barks at me. My New Year's resolution is not to bark back.”

“The rapid growth of prenatal testing has had some undeniably positive effects: A woman who knows she will bear a child with a handicap can plan to deliver in a hospital equipped for risky births. A...”

“I'm so pathetically eager for people to love D.C. It's so sad. It's like I work for the chamber of commerce or something.”

“You keep waiting for the moral of your life to become obvious, but it never does. Work, work, work: No moral. No plot. No eureka! Just production schedules and days. You might as well be living ins...”

“Does truth have a moral?”

“I wished to tell the truth, for truth always conveys its own moral to those who are able to receive it.”

“This paying attention is the foundational act of empathy, of listening, of seeing, of imagining experiences other than one's own, of getting out of the boundaries of one's own experience. There's a...”

“If you fall into the category of people who want to make a great use of their existence, you need to ask yourself these two questions; what am I doing now?; Where is it taking me to?”

“To use language is to enter into the territory of categories, which are as necessary as they are dangerous.”