Most full lives are filled with empty gestures.

The rare, delicate flavor of a life after retiring in one's sixties, whatever one has "retired" from, the pleasure I experienced beyond my job at Columbia, is a gift of life in the last decades. but it is not easily learned. . . . But sometimes, the only way to live is to get out, or at least seriously to contemplate getting out, doing the impossible,flinging the conventional tea.

You can flush my ashes down the toilet, for all I care.

One hires lawyers as on hires plumbers, because one wants to keep one's hands off the beastly drains.

a revolutionary marriage ... [is] one in which both partners have work at the center of their lives and must find a delicate balance that can support both together and each individually.

It's hard to be happy, and safe, and applauded in a miserable world.

Upon becoming fifty the one thing you can't afford is habit.