Our only hope rests on the off-chance that God does exist.

Optimism is the last resort of those in deep despair. There can't be any optimists in heaven.

Those who live on vanity must, not unreasonably, expect to die of mortification.

I have frequently thought that the dead should be buried with all their belongings. It seems weirdly perverse that their clothes should still be here when the people you love best in the world have gone.

things are never so indescribably ghastly that they can't get worse.

The snag in being married to a person who knows more or less everything is that one gets hopelessly lazy. ... I never look things up in books because all I need to do is ask him, and when he gives me the answers I don't properly commit them to memory because I know if I forget all I have to do is to ask him again. It is rather like keeping one's brain in a suitcase.

Phrase books seem to be a universal and eternal source of hilarity and I think I know why. Their authors go mad in the course of compiling them.