America is a country that seems forever to be toddler or teenager, at those two stages of human development characterized by conflict between autonomy and security.
Ideas are only lethal if you suppress and don't discuss them. Ignorance is not bliss, it's stupid. Banning books shows you don't trust your kids to think and you don't trust yourself to be able to talk to them.
Here is the real domino theory - gay man to gay man, bisexual man to straight woman, addict mother to newborn baby, they all fall down and someday it will come to you.
If there is anyone who's living the work of the New Testament, it's the nuns of the Catholic church and not the Catholic hierarchy.
The clearest explanation for the failure of any marriage is that the two people are incompatible; that is, that one is male and the other female.
All of the qualities that you need to be a good opinion columnist tend to be qualities that aren't valued in women.
Look back, to slavery, to suffrage, to integration and one thing is clear. Fashions in bigotry come and go. The right thing lasts.
People always blame the girl; she should have said no. A monosyllable, but conventional wisdom has always been that boys can't manage it.
The issue is privacy. Why is the decision by a woman to sleep with a man she has just met in a bar a private one, and the decision to sleep with the same man for $100 subject to criminal penalties?
Raising a child is a little like Picasso's work; in the beginning he did very conventional representational things. Cubism came after he had the rules down pat.
All parents should be aware that when they mock or curse gay people, they may be mocking or cursing their own child.
I would be the most content if my children grew up to be the kind of people who think decorating consists mostly of building enough bookshelves.
There is a lot of talk now about metal detectors and gun control. Both are good things. But they are no more a solution than forks and spoons are a solution to world hunger.
Ideas are like pizza dough, made to be tossed around.
If you want something, it will elude you. If you do not want something, you will get ten of it in the mail.
There is something so settled and stodgy about turning a great romance into next of kin on an emergency room form, and something so soothing and special, too.
Women who marry early are often overly enamored of the kind of man who looks great in wedding pictures and passes the maid of honor his telephone number.
Life is not so much about beginnings and endings as it is about going on and on and on. It is about muddling through the middle.
I read and walked for miles at night along the beach, writing bad blank verse and searching endlessly for someone wonderful who would step out of the darkness and change my life. It never crossed my mind that that person could be me.
The problem... is emblematic of what hasn't changed during the equal opportunity revolution of the last 20 years. Doors opened; opportunities evolved. Law, institutions, corporations moved forward. But many minds did not.
