"Zoe stopped one last time in front of the mirror, adjusting her new American dress. She didn’t see the dress, however. She saw what the big Russian did to her. She saw what al-Qaeda did to her. She saw a person shunned by her Persian village. She saw ugliness. Every time she looked in the mirror she saw deficiency."

"The Supreme Court has in place a legal structure which protects abortion rights in this country, and something has got to be done to change that before we can put in place truly meaningful protection for the unborn."

"A man really writes for an audience of about ten persons. Of course if others like it that is clear gain. But if those ten are satisfied he is content."

"A human has seven litres of blood. This they had taught him in the army. Seven litres, which, with an arterial cut will vent a fountain two or three metres, and take three to four minutes to bleed out."

"The first thing I tried to do in the months after losing my mother was to write a poem. I found myself turning to poetry in the way so many people do - to make sense of losses. And I wrote pretty bad poems about it. But it did feel that the poem was the only place that could hold this grief."

"We thought we'd seen it all. The real horror of war is always waiting for you at home. It's waiting, I tell you. We were so damned happy when we got back. We'd made it. We survived. But it's always waiting. Waiting. You let down your guard. And there it is. You can't ever let up. Give up."

"Life on earth evolved gradually beginning with one primitive life form – perhaps a self-replicating molecule – that lived more than 3.5 billion years ago; it then branched out over time, throwing off many new and diverse species; and the mechanism for most (but not all) of evolutionary change is natural selection."