My home was in a pleasant place outside of Philadelphia. But I really lived, truly lived, somewhere else. I lived within the covers of books.

I can't think of anything to write about except families. They are a metaphor for every other part of society.

Look at the view and you'll never be disappointed.

In the family sandwich, the older people and the younger ones can recognize one another as the bread. Those in the middle are, for a time, the meat.

By the time you kill and mount what you catch, it has lost that very thing that made it worth having. I knew this only as a vague sense of disappointment at age 10; not until later did I recognize it as a metaphor for much of life.

No one thinks anything silly is suitable when they are an adolescent. Such an enormous share of their own behavior is silly that they lose all proper perspective on silliness, like a baker who is nauseated by the sight of his own eclairs. This provides another good argument for the emerging theory that the best use of cryogenics is to freeze all human beings when they are between the ages of twelve and nineteen.

That's what makes life so hard for women, that instead of thinking that this is the way things are, we always think it's the way we are.