Youth is the period in which a man can be hopeless. The end of every episode is the end of the world. But the power of hoping through everything, the knowledge that the soul survives its adventures, that great inspiration comes to the middle-aged.

A new philosophy generally means in practice the praise of some old vice.

A woman uses her intelligence to find reasons to support her intuition.

An adventure is only an inconvenience rightly considered. An inconvenience is only an adventure wrongly considered.

We can not wait until we have enough trained people willing to work at a teacher's salary and under conditions imposed upon teachers in order to improve what happens in the classroom.

People need to realize that community colleges really give you a good education. And they do - that's just a simple fact of it.

Our goal here in New York is to ensure that every child who graduates high school is ready to start a career or start college and to dramatically increase the number of students that graduate from college.

Writing became an obsessive compulsive habit but I had almost no money so I thought about being an urban firefighter and having lots of free time in which to write or becoming an English teacher and thinking about books and writers on a daily basis. That swayed me.