Brent Berlin and Paul Kay in Basic Color Terms demonstrate exhaustively and empirically, the very simple thesis that anywhere in the world, as a language develops and acquires names for color, the colors always enter in the same order. The most primitive are black and white. Then red. Then either green or yellow.

I kneel to my Lord because I am such a failure. I pray, I hope, I look to the Gospels.

The parrot holds its food for prim consumption as daintily as any debutante, [with] a predilection for pot roast, hashed-brown potatoes, duck skin, butter, hoisin sauce, sesame seed oil, bananas and human thumb.

Hypocrisy is the essence of snobbery, but all snobbery is about the problem of belonging.

Book-publishing is all about politics. Agents, editors, which books will be puffed, which ignored, etc.

There is no loneliness like that of a failed marriage.

There is a terrible blindness in the love that wants only to accommodate. It's not only to do with omissions and half-truths. It implants a lack of being in the speaker and robs the self of an identity without which it is impossible for one to grow close to another.