Summer is not obligatory. We can start an infernally hard jigsaw puzzle in June with the knowledge that, if there are enough rainy days, we may just finish it by Labor Day, but if not, there's no harm, no penalty. We may have better things to do.
Nancy Gibbs

Runners exalt the marathon as a public test of private will, when months or years of solitary training, early mornings, lost weekends, rain and pain mature into triumph or surrender. That's one reason the race-day crowds matter, the friends who come to cheer and stomp and flap their signs and push the runners on.
Nancy Gibbs

Most of us were probably less than immaculately honest as teenagers; it's practically encoded into adolescence that you savor your secrets, dress in disguise, carve out some space for experiments and accidents and all the combustible lab work of becoming who you are.
Nancy Gibbs

It's always been a luxury to be able to hop a plane to Paris, to Venice, to the Grand Canyon.
Nancy Gibbs

On a normal day, we value heroism because it is uncommon. On Sept. 11, we valued heroism because it was everywhere.
Nancy Gibbs

Power is a tool, influence is a skill; one is a fist, the other a fingertip.
Nancy Gibbs

Virtues, like viruses, have their seasons of contagion. When catastrophe strikes, generosity spikes like a fever. Courage spreads in the face of tyranny.
Nancy Gibbs

The 1950s felt so safe and smug, the '60s so raw and raucous, the revolutions stacked one on top of another, in race relations, gender roles, generational conflict, the clash of church and state - so many values and vanities tossed on the bonfire, and no one had a concordance to explain why it was all happening at once.
Nancy Gibbs

High achievers, we imagine, were wired for greatness from birth. But then you have to wonder why, over time, natural talent seems to ignite in some people and dim in others.
Nancy Gibbs

It's hard to think of any tool, any instrument, any object in history with which so many developed so close a relationship so quickly as we have with our phones.
Nancy Gibbs

We know what the birth of a revolution looks like: A student stands before a tank. A fruit seller sets himself on fire. A line of monks link arms in a human chain. Crowds surge, soldiers fire, gusts of rage pull down the monuments of tyrants, and maybe, sometimes, justice rises from the flames.
Nancy Gibbs

The leading cause of death for girls 15 to 19 worldwide is not accident or violence or disease; it is complications from pregnancy. Girls under 15 are up to five times as likely to die while having children than are women in their 20s, and their babies are more likely to die as well.
Nancy Gibbs

The path of progress cuts through the four-way intersection of the moral, medical, religious and political - and whichever way you turn, you are likely to run over someone's deeply held beliefs.
Nancy Gibbs

A typical smart phone has more computing power than Apollo 11 when it landed a man on the moon.
Nancy Gibbs

Maybe we adults idealize our own red-rover days, the hot afternoons spent playing games that required no coaches, eating foods that involved no nutrition, getting dirty in whole new ways and rarely glancing in the direction of a screen of any kind.
Nancy Gibbs

Accidents at power plants are bad enough. But a leak from a bioreactor could be worse, since bacteria can learn new tricks when you're not looking.
Nancy Gibbs

All our efforts to guard and guide our children may just get in the way of the one thing they need most from us: to be deeply loved yet left alone so they can try a new skill, new slang, new style, new flip-flops. So they can trip a few times, make mistakes, cross them out, try again, with no one keeping score.
Nancy Gibbs

A runner's stride is not perfectly efficient.
Nancy Gibbs

I live in a dumb house. Which is not to say that I don't love its quirky charm, its drafty windows and leaky fireplaces and an electrical system that protests when too many people are trying to vacuum and microwave at the same time. But charm is not always user-friendly.
Nancy Gibbs

I come from a family of teachers, and I believe ideas matter; the good ones deserve reverence, and the bad ones, defiance.
Nancy Gibbs

Just because we eat together does not mean we eat right: Domino's alone delivers a million pizzas on an average day.
Nancy Gibbs

Making distinctions is part of learning. So is making mistakes.
Nancy Gibbs

I have two daughters: One an open book, one a locked box. So the question of privacy is a challenging one. How much do kids need? How much should we give? How do we prepare them to live in a world where the very notion of privacy opens a generational chasm?
Nancy Gibbs

High school is a haunted house in April, when seniors act up because the end is near. Even those who hate school sometimes cling to the devil they know. And for the kids who love it, the goodbyes are hard to think about.
Nancy Gibbs

Americans sometimes ask what the government does and where their tax money goes. Among other things, it pays for all kinds of invisible but essential safety nets and life belts and guardrails that are useless right up until the day they are priceless.
Nancy Gibbs

The Reverend Jeremiah Wright would baptize Obama, perform his marriage to Michelle LaVaughn Robinson, baptize their daughters, and draw him into the raucous, restless family of faith that Obama had never known before.
Nancy Gibbs