Nobody's perfect... Well, there was this one guy, but we killed him.

As a teacher of fourth-graders in a public school, where corporal punishement was not allowed, she had years of violence stored up and was, truth be told, sort of enjoying letting it out on Kona, who she felt could have been the poster child for the failure of public education.

. . . And so Charlie Asher . . . led an army of fourteen-inch-tall bundles of animal bits, armed with everything from knitting needles to a spork, into the storm sewers of San Fransciso.

She hugged me and I could feel the heat rise in my face, either from shame or love, like there was a difference.

Diogenes carried a bowl with him for years, but one day saw a man drinking from his cupped palm and declared, ‘I have been a fool, burdened all these years by the weight of a bowl when a perfectly good vessel lay at the end of my wrist.

After all the evidence is in--after you've run all the facts by everything you know--and you're still lost, you have to do some things on faith.

Don't be ridiculous, Charlie, people love the parents who beat their kids in department stores. It's the ones who just let their kids wreak havoc that everybody hates.