The mystery at the center of 'Burial Rites' is not who killed whom on the night of March 13, 1828. It is the mystery each of us encounters: Can we every truly know another? Can we ever truly know ourselves?
Say there are three identical-looking pizza joints on a street. Two of those will always be empty. The third will have a line of people patiently waiting, checking their phones. There's always one place that's the place. That's how it works.
I think after overcoming breast cancer, you sort of become fearless and somehow going up to your boss to talk about a possible promotion doesn't seem like such a daunting task anymore.
Sometimes when things are way too big and I can't control it, I do sort of a weird thing where I kind of check out a little bit. It's all about self-preservation for me.
I'm an optimist, so I think everything can be worked out and fixed. But from having cancer I learned that even if you're even an optimist, sometimes you just have to face the facts that certain things are broken.
When my shoes are killing me, I take a maxi pad and put it in the bottom of my shoe. It is better than any Dr. Scholl's insert. That fashion tip has saved me through some long nights.
My dream, I remember, when I went to boarding school, was to have a study all my own, a little nook someplace where nobody could get at me - nobody, like the football coach.
After the navy, I transferred to Harvard and finished there. I was there the spring term of 1951 and I stayed through the summer term and a whole other year, so I was able to do two years in a little less than a year and a half.
And the program was developed in large part by behavioral scientists who were working with the military, who do everything they possibly can to measure a soldier's stress levels to see how they're doing physically and emotionally, as they go through ...
I mean, the people who run Guantanamo, the military, pretty much dismiss complaints by the detainees because they say that they're all created as part of a political process to sort of fake complaints and get public support.
Beyond its romance, 'Titanic' offers an indelibly wrenching story of blind arrogance and its terrible consequences. It's the rare Hollywood adventure film that brings mythic images of tragedy - the fall of Icarus, the ruin of Ozymandias - so easily t...
I used to take five or six books away and bring five or six books back. Nobody gave me direction or advice and I read much in the way that a boy might watch television.
The rosary was said every evening. I always liked that sentence about the medieval Churches, that they were the Bibles of the poor. The Church was my first book and I would think it is still my most important book.
The way I see it is that all the ol' guff about being Irish is a kind of nonsense. I mean, I couldn't be anything else no matter what I tried to be. I couldn't be Chinese or Japanese.
Baseball, boxing, handball - sooner or later every game gets compared to narrative, but only in football are the plays perfectly linear, drawn up with letters, and only in football is the field itself lined like a sheet of notebook paper.
I'm a big fan of the poet Mary Jo Salter, and although she doesn't need to be discovered at all - she's widely admired and anthologized and extremely accomplished - I wish she were a household name.
The magic of life is its imprecision, the multiple narratives constantly unfolding before us. Every step we take, every decision we make, reshuffles the deck of our lives and sets a new trajectory of possibility in motion.
She recalled her father saying to her, 'My dear Anna, do not forget that a friend who is not willing to risk his very friendship for a friend is perhaps not such a good friend as he thinks he is.
In the days when corporate downsizing was all the rage, Wall Street took a lot of flak for judging companies too harshly and setting the bar for corporate performance so high that executives felt their only option was to slash payrolls.
For a crowd to be smart, the people in it need to be not only diverse in their perspectives but also, relatively speaking, independent of each other. In other words, you need people to be thinking for themselves, rather than following the lead of tho...
Campaigns fail if they waste resources courting voters who are unpersuadable or already persuaded. Their most urgent task is to find and persuade the few voters who are genuinely undecided and the larger number who are favorably disposed but need a p...
