Needy people are like newborns, I have come to realize. One intoxicated night and BAM! You are stuck with this problem. You finally take it home and it wants to keep you up all night and cries when it isn’t sucking on various parts of your anatomy....
Life is not to be taken seriously, as we are really temporary here. We are like a pre-paid card with limited validity. If we are lucky, we may last another 50 years. And 50 years is just 2,500 weekends. Do we really need to get so worked up? It’s o...
Galvanized people can do careless things. It is in the extreme and emotion-laden moments that distance and coolness are most required. I am tempted to howl in rage. It is not my place to do so. My job is to try to dissect the event, place it in conte...
You know something, it’s not easy to break out of your comfort zone. People will tear you down, tell you you shouldn’t have bothered in the first place. But let me tell you something, there’s not much of a difference between a stadium full with...
It was so important that she should understand something of what his life in this country had been; that she should grasp the nature of the loneliness that he wanted her to nullify. And it was so devilishly difficult to explain. It is devilish to suf...
... but if I've learned one thing, it's this: forgiveness is crucial. If you can't forgive someone you're mad at, that anger will poison you. You have to learn to let it go"... "people have reasons for doing the things that they do, especially when t...
Some very hungry people gathered to discuss how to distribute a small amount of food. It was understood that each church was supposed to take care of its own. The local Episcopal rector said, "My church, follow me." The Presbyterian minister said, "M...
Take away the newspaper—and this country of ours would become a scene of chaos. Without daily assurance of the exact facts—so far as we are able to know and publish them—the public imagination would run riot. Ten days without the daily newspape...
The man was staring directly at him now, a curious expression on his face, half smiling, half quizzical. Instantly Eager had a sense of certainty far deeper than anything he had experienced so far. "I have it too!" he exclaimed. "I am a part of this ...
He had read much of things as they are, and talked with too many people. Well-meaning philosophers had taught him to look into the logical relations of things, and analyse the processes which shaped his thoughts and fancies. Wonder had gone away, and...
I'd rather you shot at tin cans in the back yard, but i know you'll go after birds. Shoot all the bluejays you want, if you can hit 'em, but remember it's a sin to kill a mockingbird..... Mockingbirds don't do one thing to but make music for us to en...
You people who have survived childhood don't remeber any longer what it was like. You think children are whole, uncomplicated creatures, and if you split them in two with a handy axe there would be all one substance inside, hard candy. But it isn't h...
There are all sorts of losses people suffer - from the small to the large. You can lose your keys, your glasses, your virginity. You can lose your head, you can lose your heart, you can lose your mind. You can relinquish your home to move into assist...
[With comedy and wanting to make people laugh,] when you're a child, all you want is ANY kind of laugh. You get them to laugh, and great! - you've succeeded. And then it's "How FAST can I get them to laugh?" "How LONG can I get them to laugh?", "How ...
One of the many things I learned at the end of that Classics corridor down which I ventured at the age of 18, in search of something I could not then define, was this, written by the Greek author Plutarch: What we achieve inwardly will change outer r...
[L]ike people, ideas have social lives. They’re one way when they’re by themselves, and another when they’re surrounded by their peers. Crammed together, they grow more uncertain, more interesting, more surprising; they come out of themselves a...
I never need to find time to read. When people say to me, ‘Oh, yeah, I love reading. I would love to read, but I just don’t have time,’ I’m thinking, ‘How can you not have time?’ I read when I’m drying my hair. I read in the bath. I rea...
Except for the field organizers of strikes, who were pretty tough monkeys and devoted, most of the so-called Communists I met were middle-class, middle-aged people playing a game of dreams. I remember a woman in easy circumstances saying to another e...
Too many people think that when a couple doesn’t fight that they are strong, but I have never bought that. The question should never be “do you fight,” but “can you fight,” because fights happen, that’s just the way it is. What’s import...
We call our country home of the brave and land of the free, but it's not. We give a false portrayal of freedom. We're not free — if we were, we'd allow people their freedom. Prohibiting something doesn't make it go away. Prostitution is criminal, a...
We all love after-the-bomb stories. If we didn't, why would there be so many of them? There's something attractive about all those people being gone, about wandering in a depopulated world, scrounging cans of Campbell's pork and beans, defending one'...
