And I have begun thinking of that life as miraculous and lucky. How could a man I had dreaded as my commandant and who tried twice to get me kicked out of college become the subject of the first book I would write? [...] Who could have foreseen the day I would deliver his eulogy at the Summerall Chapel, or that I would give a speech on the night they named the dining room in the new Alumni Hall after him? Not me. Not once. Not ever.

The choices I didn’t make are almost as ruinous as the ones I did.

Why do they not teach you that time is a finger snap and an eye blink, and that you should not allow a moment to pass you by without taking joyous, ecstatic note of it, not wasting a single moment of its swift, breakneck circuit?

There is no downside to winning. It feels forever fabulous.

I think that my mother, Frances Dorothy Peck, modeled her whole life on that of Scarlett O'Hara.

All life connects ... Nothing happens that is meaningless.