“...the struggle for grammatical uprightness begins not on the printed page, but in the soul.”

“It's the creeping menace of carelessness!”

“As human beings, how do we choose to react in that instant when someone walks toward us, smiles, and begins to speak?”

“The world needed changing - that I knew. Global warming threatened to give us all a lethal tan; war and poverty decimated whole nations; crops worldwide were shriveling; even our brethren beasts menaced us with their monkey pox and bird flu and mad cow disease.”

“After graduating, I'd moved to the Washington D.C. area to see what I could do with the skills I'd picked up from a creative writing degree. The chief export of the nation's capital is, of course, paper work, so I reckoned I could land some kind of writing or editing position at one of the many nonprofits and associations in the area.”

“The standard clauses of the American dream only included two weeks of vacation a year.”

“She described to us six lanes' worth of unadulterated fear, populated exclusively by motorists whose driving education had been paid for by the blood of pedestrians.”