Wishing, like sipping a glass of punch, or pulling aside a bearskin rug in order to access a hidden trapdoor in the floor, is merely a quiet way to spend one's time before the candles are extinguished on one's birthday cake.

It has been said that the hardest job in the world is raising a child, but the people who says this have probably never worked at a comb factory or captured pirates on the high seas.

It is very easy to say that the important thing is to try your best, but if you are in real trouble the most important thing is not trying your best, but getting to safety.

You might find it difficult to see anything but your own sadness, the way smoke can cover a landscape so that all anyone can see is black. You may find that if someone pours water all over you, you are damp and distracted, but not cured of your sadness, the way a fire department can douse a fire but never recover what has been burnt down.

There's information about everything from poetry to pills, from picture frames to pyramids, and from pudding to psychology--and that's just in the P aisle, which we're walking down right now.

The trouble with talking about irony is, it's such a slippery thing that the second you start talking about it, you're a better example of it than you are an analyst.

Scolding must be very, very fun, otherwise children would be allowed to do it. It is not because children don’t have what it takes to scold. You need only three things, really. You need time, to think up scolding things to say. You need effort, to put these scolding things in a good order, so that the scolding can be more and more insulting to the person being scolded. And you need chutzpah, which is a word for the sort of show-offy courage it takes to stand in front of someone and give them a good scolding, particularly if they are exhausted and sore and not in the mood to hear it.