Quotes from Laura Moser

I had to work up the courage to even imagine myself running for Congress. But I eventually decided that our country had a moral problem in only letting white men - even the right-minded ones - have a seat at the table.

I never experienced much outright anti-Semitism. While we learned about the Holocaust - endlessly, it felt like - no spray-painted swastika ever appeared on my childhood landscape. Jewish persecution was an ever-looming reality, but always an abstract one.

In my career as a writer, I preferred to avoid current events: I wrote young adult novels and book reviews and lifestyle journalism about health and parenting and other such evergreens.

Campaign widowhood totally suited me, and I soon began to suspect that our setup beat the bill-paying and bickering of an actual marriage.

Wishy-washy equivocations - and not just on abortion, but on immigration, on civil rights, on income inequality - weaken all of us.

We can all get behind feeding the poorest kids in school, right?

My grandfather arrived in Houston in 1942 as a refugee from Nazi Germany. He had lost everything - his profession, his language, his money - but the city welcomed him, as it has hundreds of thousands of immigrants over the years.

Grit can't be measured on pop quizzes, but it can often predict long-term success more than mere intelligence.

What role should religion play in the American public school classroom? My own knee-jerk response would be, 'none whatsoever,' but the Constitution isn't quite so direct on the subject.

I was a campaign widow.

Don't most of us agree that providing school meals to kids who need them is an overwhelmingly good thing? After all, nutrition is essential to proper cognitive development.

I believe in following opportunities.

I've always wanted to walk the whole of the Chesapeake & Ohio Canal, which winds 184.5 miles from Georgetown to Cumberland, Maryland.

My husband and I were married in May 2007 on a sprawling rent-a-ranch in the Texas Hill Country. On the drive from Houston, we'd stopped off for our marriage license in the former produce aisle of a Winn Dixie-turned-courthouse in San Marcos and from there drove off the grid.

I don't claim any great experience or expertise.

The only lottery I've ever won was a $100 scratch-off card at age 16, and the 7-Eleven clerk who sold it to me said I was too young to claim my winnings.

Calling representatives every single day, arranging local community meetings, and marching in the streets every Sunday. It's not the path to glory, but it's absolutely essential to maintaining a democracy under threat.

A big reason I'd spent my career as a writer and not a public speaker is that I am a person who refines my worldview in a silent room, waiting for my thoughts to arrange themselves on the screen before me.

If we all band together against extremism and spend a few minutes a day using tools that have been proven to work, we can make a big difference in defending those values we share as Americans.

I've basically worked as a journalist and a writer.

Ohio has long been an embarrassment to charter-school supporters nationwide, with its trail of scandal and graft and abysmal student performance.

I married a man whose Hindu father grew up in the rural north of India and whose Jewish mother grew up in the Bronx.

As more and more minority groups fill our nation's classrooms, what can we do to even the separate-but-forever-unequal playing field? Now that's a question many very smart people have spent decades trying to answer.

It's a truism to say that my state, Texas, isn't a red state: It's a nonvoting state.