A passion for politics stems usually from an insatiable need, either for power, or for friendship and adulation, or a combination of both.

Housework is a breeze. Cooking is a pleasant diversion. Putting up a retaining wall is a lark. But teaching is like climbing a mountain.

A man's memory is bound to be a distortion of his past in accordance with his present interests, and the most faithful autobiography is likely to mirror less what a man was than what he has become.

There is, of course, a gold mine or a buried treasure on every mortgaged homestead. Whether the farmer ever digs for it or not, it is there, haunting his daydreams when the burden of debt is most unbearable.

Show me a character whose life arouses my curiosity, and my flesh begins crawling with suspense.

My mom and dad refused to believe that people who had grown up together in peace and friendship, had gone to the same schools, spoken the same language, and listened to the same music, could overnight be blinded by ethnic hatred and start to brutally kill one another. They simply didn't accept as true that less than two years of a multiparty system and competition for power could poison people's brains so much.