Self-respect is a question of recognizing that anything worth having has a price.

To those of us who remained committed mainly to the exploration of moral distinctions and ambiguities, the feminist analysis may have seemed a particularly narrow and cracked determinism.

Memories are what you no longer want to remember.

Of course, you always think about how it will be read. I always aim for a reading in one sitting.

I'll never get out of politics. I have friends in public office. I have things that I want to do. You can't go back in life. I won't go back to the existence I had before of running a political consulting firm and signing up clients and advising campaigns in exactly that way.

A song has a life of its own. It's an autonomous thing, separate from your own experience, almost. And the mere repetition of it means it's subject to change; it means approaching it differently, expressing different emotional aspects of it. It doesn't feel like wallowing.

Of life's two chief prizes, beauty and truth, I found the first in a loving heart and the second in a laborer's hand.

As foreign attacks increase, it's easy to treat them like bad weather happening somewhere else. It's what we read over breakfast. But when that storm hits your shores, remember this: Wishful thinking never saved a single life. The truth, however, has.