I worked for a brief spell as a journalist, but soon I discovered that I didn't want to be a journalist - I wanted to be a historian.
People think that when you use Google you're finding exactly what you need, but really, you need expert help.
While I was serving, I worked as an adventure training officer, teaching soldiers how to ski, canoe and climb.
As a rule, anything that is pretty you avoid when on an expedition in the polar extremes. Normally anything other than white means a hazard such as a crevasse.
I never quite envisioned myself a proper doctor under that white coat, but I was interested in the idea of healing and in the psychological dimension rather early on.
It was because of my deep concerns about nuclear weapons that I went to Hiroshima. And then I was astounded in Hiroshima to find that nobody had really studied it.
I don't want anything to do with anything mechanical between me and the paper, including a typewriter, and I don't even want a fountain pen between me and the paper.
My next book is on the Salem witch trials. As a small-town Massachusetts girl, this makes me very happy. So does the reunion with documents!
In an ideal world, the perfect biographical subject would have been the star of his penmanship class at grade school - and would thereafter write an English that positively sings.
An interesting thing about book groups, it seems to me, is that there is no correlation between a brilliant book and a brilliant discussion. The first seems sometimes even to undermine the second.
Yet another thing Canadians and Europeans have in common is an obsession with the United States, and with distinguishing themselves from it, often by crude stereotyping.
Governing was always difficult for conservatives, but as they return to the opposition, they are rediscovering their skill at blame evasion.
Promises to get beyond partisanship are the most perfunctory sort of campaign rhetoric, almost as empty as the partisanship itself.
Surrogate motherhood has been the subject of much philosophical and political dispute over the years.
Leftovers in their less visible form are called memories. Stored in the refrigerator of the mind and the cupboard of the heart.
No man can be happy without a friend, nor be sure of his friend till he is unhappy.
He does not believe who does not live according to his belief.
Get the facts, or the facts will get you. And when you get em, get em right, or they will get you wrong.
Two things a man should never be angry at: what he can help, and what he cannot help.
Better one's House be too little one day than too big all the Year after.
Memory is the treasure house of the mind wherein the monuments thereof are kept and preserved.
