Single life should be experimental in nature and open to accidents. Some accidents are happy ones.

In a proper pub everyone there is potentially, if not a lifelong friend, at least someone to lure into an argument about foreign policy or the Red Sox.

The thing to remember is that children are temporary. As soon as they develop a sense of humor and get to be good company, maybe even remember to take the trash out and close the refrigerator door, they pack up their electronic equipment and their clothes, and some of your clothes, and leave in a U-Haul, to return only at Thanksgiving.

a woman may be called a wife and mother for most of her life, while a man is called a husband and father only at his funeral.

Life, after we'd had a few millennia to observe it, turned out to be dreadfully unfair, so we invented sports.

Very few people have no opinions about cats.

Are you seeing a psychiatrist?' as a conversation opener would nowadays earn you a punch in the nose, but for fifty years it was a compliment. It meant, 'One can plainly see you are sensitive, intense, and interesting, and therefore neurotic.' Only the dullest of clods trudged around without a neurosis.