Porches are America's lost rooms.

There is no way to take the danger out of human relationships.

There is something worse than dying, and that is humiliation - at least so it seemed to me.

Sometimes I think that just not thinking of oneself is a form of prayer. . .

What you desire you call into being.

It's the perpetually unfinished quality of housework that makes it oppressive - it never ends, like bad psychoanalysis, or a dream interrupted. It is paradoxically true that it is exactly this daily re-creation of the world that lends housekeeping its nobility and romance.

How do you think it would feel to be obliged to ask for a seat-belt extender on an airplane? For the unfashionably bulgy, life is a series of small humiliations.