“Unlike most fine writers, he wasn't in love with his own words.”

“Having recorded his first album, 'Tapestry,' in 1969, in Berkeley, California, during the student riots, McLean, a native New Yorker, became a kind of weather vane for what he called the 'generatio...”

“If Reagan had intelligence information that showed that the upheaval in Egypt is actually Democratic in spirit, then he would have, I believe, turned his back on Mubarak, even though there's a long...”

“Stubbornness is a positive quality of presidential leadership - if you're right about what you're stubborn about.”

“The myth-making about Appomattox started from the moment Lee left the courthouse on his horse to travel to Richmond.”

“John Kerry had a very vivid imagination as a young person. I mean, he actually did go and take his bicycle from Norway to go camp in Sherwood Forest to be around the ghost of Robin Hood.”

“Though there had yet to be a victor in this great war that had begun almost three years ago, Maurice had written to her that they had, all of them, on all sides, lost their freedom. Freedom to thin...”

“Then I thought, boy, isn't that just typical? You wait and wait and wait for something, and then when it happens, you feel sad.”

“I'm living under water. Everything seems slow and far away. I know there's a world up there, a sunlit quick world where time runs like dry sand through an hourglass, but down here, where I am, air ...”

“As the sun sinksIt casts that silver bridgeAcross the lake”

“Because the difference between a friend and a real friend is that you and the real friend come from the same territory, of the same place deep inside you, and that means you see the world in the sa...”

“I'll figure out how to be truer: to let people go if they need to be let go of, and to hold on tight if that's what's called for. I will pay attention, so I can cross each human heart that comes ac...”

“When you think you're right, you're most likely wrong.”

“Stand up for what is right even if you're standing alone.”

“If we go to war, it must only be with right on our side.”