I’m not sure I can think of anything sadder than a homeless person with a homeless dog.
I have lived with magic and without magic, and I can tell you with certainty that a life with magic is better....
Everything about [chance] scares the bejesus out of so many people; it's the this thing they try to avoid at all costs. Don't travel to the Middle East these days - there's a chance something could ha...
Elena believed that reportage like that might be compelling and beautiful, but it would never gain traction in the Age of the Troll. In the Age of Mass Shootings. In the Age of the Suicide Bomb in the...
Did you ever read Carlo Levi? No. You should—if you like Tolstoy. He wrote beautifully about Italian peasants. My people, once. He had a soul like Tolstoy. ‘The future has an ancient heart.’ I think I...
But it's funny how the memory works and how sometimes we just belive whatever we want.
As a species, we’re either very resilient or super callous. I don’t know which.
In her experience, dead children, unlike dead adults, always looked as if they were sleeping - though she understood that there was an element of wishful thinking whenever she had come across corpses...
If you were Bill Clinton, how did you justify Monica Lewinsky to Chelsea? What did you say about the cigar and the beret and the little blue dress? If you were Anthony Weiner, how in the world did you...
Even a magnificent city such as Florence becomes more intriguing if there is a demon at work in the alleys.
Did you know that a lot of Emily Dickinson’s poems can be sung to the theme from Gilligan’s Island? Not kidding, this is totally legit.
But she insists the family hadn’t a choice. Not true. We always have choices. Isn’t that what Dante teaches us?I really have become quite the Dante scholar: There is no greater sorrow than to recall o...
As Jeremy Bentham had asked about animals well over two hundred years ago, the question was not whether they could reason or talk, but could they suffer? And yet, somehow, it seemed to take more imagi...
My mother used to talk about passages and, once in a while, about ordeals. We all have them; we are all shaped by them. She thought the key was to find the healing in the hurt.
If they veered left, it would feel to them as if they were sinking into the earth: the path would narrow as the ground around them rose up to their hips, then shoulders, then heads. The walls would tu...
I love it when the snowflakes are flying like butterflies.
Boys look at us like we look at horses: color, height, eyes. tail. They can't help but have preferences.
And so Cristina submerged her ears beneath the water and the world grew a little quieter; her hair fanned out atop the plane and she ran her fingers through it and was reminded of a goddess in a Renai...
It was Aldous Huxley who observed, Every man’s memory is his private literature.