Ability is of little account without opportunity.

Maybe that's what we do to the people we love: take shots in the dark and realize too late that we've wounded the people we are trying to protect.

No one wants you to be yourself. They want you to be the version of yourself that they like.

As long as high schools strive to list the number of Ivy League schools their graduates attend and teachers pile on work without being trained to identify stress-related symptoms, I fear for our children’s health. I am not mollified by the alums of my daughter’s school who return to tell everyone that the rigor of high school prepared them for college, making their first year easier than they’d anticipated.If they make it that far.

The only difference between fiction and religion is that people don't kill themselves over fiction.

Then the liars and swearers are fools, for there are liars and swearers enough to beat the honest men and hang up them.

Sarcasm is the new staircase to stardom.

Everything has a price. The price, however, isn't always money.

One is punished most for one’s virtues.

There's very little authentic study of the humanities remaining. My research assistant came to me two years ago saying she'd been in a seminar in which the teacher spent two hours saying that Walt Whitman was a racist. This isn't even good nonsense. It's insufferable.