Dogwoods are great optimists. Daffodils wait and see, crouching firmly underground just in case spring doesn't come this year, but dogwoods have faith.

Our Revolution was born and raised in taverns.

The only people who still read poetry are poets, and they mostly read their own.

My friends and I were all deathly afraid of our fathers, which was right and proper and even biblically ordained. Fathers were angry; it was their job.

We don't get enough pampering. If we were once the only child of an adoring mother, we developed a taste for it; if not, we developed a thirst for it.

To extract the fullest flavor of our drinking house, we needed to spend serious evening time there, slowly coming to know the bartender and the regulars, their joys and sorrows.

parents needn't bother driving small children around to see the purple mountains' majesties; the children will go right on duking it out in the back seat and whining for food as if you were showing them Cincinnati. No one under twenty really wants to look at scenery.