If you are forced to describe things for someone else, it sharpens your senses. And also your sense of how hard it is to make the translation from the vibrant, multi-faceted world to a sentence that distils it.

As for the multiple editions, in the case of a truly great writer - Shakespeare, Emily Dickinson, Proust, someone with a canon - there is often a variorum edition of the work that presents its variants. I think publishing most other writing that way would be impossible, economically, for publishers, and very ill-advised for authors.

Here was a monument, in fieldstone, to the art of family life.

Every dreamer knows that it is entirely possible to be homesick for a place you've never been to, perhaps more homesick than for familiar ground.

This is the river of the great 19th-century landscapists of Cole, Cropsey and Church, and at the end of the summer it lies motionless under the haze as under a light coat of varnish.

And that may be [Helen Gurley] Brown’s most enlightened lesson: that sexual autonomy and fulfillment are inseparable from the autonomy and fulfillment that a woman gets from her career.

Conservatives like Palin and Reagan and others do seem to love the series, but so do people of all political stripes and backgrounds. I speak about the series' radiant simplicity.

A mad person sees what isn't there A visionary sees what isn't there yet

We have one life to live - and one chance to live it in the richest way possible.