If an opportunity scares you, that's God's way of saying you should jump at it.

Life is not so much about beginnings and endings as it is about going on and on and on. It is about muddling through the middle.

... It was the idea of facing a future skimming the surface of life, winging my way in and out of other people's crises, confusions, and passages, engaging them enough to get the story, but never enough to be indelibly touched by what I had seen or heard.

Look back, to slavery, to suffrage, to integration and one thing is clear. Fashions in bigotry come and go. The right thing lasts.

I like to say that my mother had a very ordinary life. From the outside it didn't look like there was anything particularly special or wonderful about it, but when you watch somebody hold on to that life with both hands, it makes you think that life must be pretty damn good.

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.

If you want something, it will elude you. If you do not want something, you will get ten of it in the mail.