The Victim Mentality May Be The Last

More Than A Decade After Our Fellow Citizens Began Bedding Down On The Sidewalks, Their Problems Continue To Seem So Intractable That We Have Begun To Do Psychologically What Government Has Been Incapable Of Doing Programmatically. We Bring The Numbers Down--not By Solving The Problem, But By Deciding It's Their Own Damn Fault.

Even As We Enumerate Their Shortcomings, The Rigor Of Raising Children Ourselves Makes Clear To Us Our Mothers' Incredible Strength. We Fear Both. If They Are Not Strong, Who Will Protect Us? If They Are Not Imperfect, How Can We Equal Them?

London Has The Trick Of Making Its Past, Its Long Indelible Past, Always A Part Of Its Present. And For That Reason It Will Always Have Meaning For The Future, Because Of All It Can Teach About Disaster, Survival, And Redemption. It Is All There In The Streets. It Is All There In The Books.

Every Story Has Already Been Told. Once You've Read Anna Karenina, Bleak House, The Sound And The Fury, To Kill A Mockingbird And A Wrinkle In Time, You Understand That There Is Really No Reason To Ever Write Another Novel. Except That Each Writer Brings To The Table, If She Will Let Herself, Something That No One Else In The History Of Time Has Ever Had.

Grief Remains One Of The Few Things That Has The Power To Silence Us.