At sunrise, the blue sky paints herself with gold colors and joyfully dances to the music of a morning breeze.

At sunset we are rattling through the streets of the little town of Cordova.

At synods, I usually wait about a week before I speak. First I listen. I feel the temperature. I listen to what has been said, what has not been said, and what I think needs to be said at that point.

At tax time, it helps to remember that if your tax obligation has increased from the previous year, it's usually because you're enjoying more income. That's a situation to which most of us aspire. Higher taxes are a price that we pay for greater success.

At tax time, people are going to say, 'Gee, if the IRS asks for documents from me, and I destroy them, I wouldn't get away with that.' But that's effectively what Commissioner Koskinen has been able to get away with.

At tea time, all the noise, greed and aggressiveness of the '80s can be drowned out. For 45 minutes, anyway.

At teenage parties he was always wandering into the garden, sitting on a bench in the dark ... staring up at the constellations and pondering all those big questions about the existence of God and the nature of evil and the mystery of death, questions which seemed more important than anything else in the would until a few years passed and some real questions had been dumped into your lap, like how to earn a living, and why people fell in and out of love, and how long you could carry on smoking and then give up without getting lung cancer.

At ten I was playing against 18-year-old guys. At 15 I was playing professional ball with the Birmingham Black Barons, so I really came very quickly in all sports.

At ten, irritable and restless, I walked to the kitchen and stole two of Nathan's beers, leaving an apologetic note under his door, and drank them, one after the other, gulping so fast that I had to suppress a huge belch. I felt bad about that damned cockroach. What was he doing after all? Just going about his cockroachy business. Maybe he'd been lonely. Maybe he'd wanted to make friends with me. I went and peered under the basin where I'd kicked him but he was definitely dead. This made me irrationally angry. I'd thought you weren't meant to be able to kill cockroaches. I'd been lied to about cockroaches. I added this to my list of things to feel furious about.

At that age, feeling unpopular is difficult to handle. It's a hard feeling to shake off. Feeling comfortable in my own skin has never been easy for me.

At that age, filming Harry Potter, I never contemplated. I just went in there and did my acting. I never thought, What's the character actually feeling here? What's he trying to get across? And never looked at it from that classically trained actor's point of view. And so when Jason Isaacs started throwing up these ideas, I thought, Whoa. What an interesting way to look at acting. Which is why, again, I would do theater.

At that age, it's one of the worse things in the world to wake up and not see your bike where you left it.

At that comfortable tavern on Pontchartrain we had a bouillabaisse than which a better was never eaten at Marseilles; and not the least headache in the morning, I give you my word; on the contrary, you only wake with a sweet refreshing thirst for claret and water.

At that instant I became a blooming lotus flower. The water in which I flourished was a single teardrop from Nyx.

At that instant a dazzling claw of lightning streaked down the length of the sky. The hedge and the distant trees seemed to leap forward in the brilliance of the flash. Immediately upon it came the thunder: a high, tearing noise, as though some huge thing were being ripped to pieces close above, which deepened and turned to enormous blows of dissolution. Then the rain fell like a waterfall. In a few seconds the ground was covered with water and over it, to a height of inches, rose a haze formed of a myriad minute splashes. Stupefied with the shock, unable even to move, the sodden rabbits crouched inert, almost pinned to the earth by the rain.

At that instant he knew that all his doubts, even the impossibility of believing with his reason, of which he was aware in himself, did not in the least hinder his turning to God. All of that now floated out of his soul like dust. To whom was he to turn if not to Him in whose hands he felt himself, his soul, and his love?

At that moment I had a thrilling sharp intuition. I knew it as if I held it in my hands: In the gloom of death that surrounded the two of us, we were just at the point of approaching and negotiating a gentle curve. If we bypassed it, we would split off into different directions. In that case, we would forever remain just friends.

At that moment I heard the vague chords of the organ, a sad harmony under an indefinable melody, veritable wails of a soul that wished to break all terrestrial ties. I listened with all my senses, hardly breathing, plunged like Captain Nemo in one of those musical ecstasies which took him beyond the limits of this world.

At that moment I was ready to forsake my other home, forsake my mother and father and little sister and all my friends, and spend the rest of my life in the desert eating cactus for lunch, drinking blood at cocktail time, and letting the ferocious sun flay me skin and soul. I'd gladly have traded parents, school, a college education and a career for one dependable saddle hourse. Later that night, of course, alone in bed, the deadly homesickness would strike me faint.