The difference between keeping things clean and keeping kids clean was that things just sat still and waited for the dirt to collect. We kids were carriers. We ran a pickup and delivery service.

Any kid who has two parents who are interested in him and has a houseful of books isn't poor.

Just try to be happy. Unhappiness starts with wanting to be happier.

Love at first sight is easy to understand; it's when two people have been looking at each other for a lifetime that it becomes a miracle.

My mother missed having dinner with Lyndon Johnson because she couldn't find the right hat to wear. While my father went off to the white house to break bread with the President, my mother, who's not a things and stuff person, stayed at the hotel and tried on 10 different hats and missed dinner.

I moved from Moscow to Rome with my family and two bicycles in 1998, and spent a lot of that year- and the next - obsessed, I am sorry to admit, with the bicycles. Italy, after all, was a place where thousands of middle-aged men felt perfectly comfortable spending many hours a week in brightly colored spandex.

I think, a lot of time, I'm just writing my worst fears, of the idea of losing my mom or my best friend or doing something so terrible to somebody that's kind of deemed unforgivable or having a really broken family.

I'm a Puerto Rican woman whose family has roots in Regla de Ocha, also known as Santeria.