If a quick glance back over world history shows us anything, it shows us that war was one of our most universal joys from our earliest beginnings, savored at every possible opportunity and even some quite incomprehensible ones.

Visiting is a pleasure; being visited is usually a mixed or ambivalent joy. ... The visitor can always go home; the visitee is already home, trapped like a rat in a drainpipe.

The United States government, in figuring our gross national product, defines 'durable goods' as anything that will last three years.

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.

We're a shifty, sliding population. ... What we refer to as 'home' may be a place we haven't seen in years; a place where there's no one left who knows our name.

Subtly, in the little ways, joy has been leaking out of our lives. The small pleasures of the ordinary day seem almost contemptible, and glance off us lightly...Perhaps it's a good time to reconsider pleasure at its roots. Changing out of wet shoes and socks, for instance. Bathrobes. Yawning and stretching. Real tomatoes.

Exercise, to qualify at all, must be lonely, painfu, humorless, and boring.