“There’s a Washington standard of casually putting things off the record. It’s really gone too far. I don’t know an easy way to turn it back.”

I thought writing about somebody current would be a little closer to what I’m used to doing.

When I came back to Washington to be The Times’ chief congressional correspondent in 1991, I was looking for a book subject, and Ted Kennedy stood out for two reasons.

Ted Kennedy’s achievements as a senator have towered over his time, changing the lives of far more Americans than remember the name Mary Jo Kopechne.

Gore speaks to America as if English is its second language; George W. speaks as if English is his second language.

Another thing that’s quite different in writing a book as a practicing newspaperman is that if you look at what you’ve written the next morning and you think you didn’t get it quite right, you can fix it.

Freedom is a loose leash, license to be different from your mother and still be loved…Freedom is…not insisting that your daughter share your limitations. Freedom also means letting your daughter reject you when she needs to and come back when she needs to. Freedom is unconditional love.

Tell me everything that I must know. Hold nothing back.

I think,” Tehanu said in her soft, strange voice, “that when I die, I can breathe back the breath that made me live.

Because even if the whole world was throwing rocks at you, if you still had your mother or father at your back, you’d be okay.

Once you have seen the larger pattern, you cannot go back to seeing the part as the whole.

I don’t think any rapper can go back. You can be a car salesman, a bank teller – I mean, really good jobs, and people are still gonna look at you and be like, ‘You used to rap; what happened?’

If we act the truth the people who really love us are sure to come back to us in the long run

If we are all made of God, it is our friends who remind us. We pass the gift of God to them. They pass it back to us when we need it most.