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.

The married are those who have taken the terrible risk of intimacy and, having taken it, know life without intimacy to be impossible.

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.

Quoting, like smoking, ... is a dirty habit to which I am devoted. But then ... I am a professor of English literature; it is an occupational hazard.

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

Whether animals admit it or not, they and I communicate.

One cannot make up stories; one can only retell in new ways the stories one has already heard.