People couldn't bear to go on living if they faced every cold truth about themselves.

I try not to spend too much time on partisan politics. Life's too short for that. I don't really believe that there have been many human problems solved by politics.

Only once in a generation does anything as fresh as a vomiting detective come along.

Any drunk who has tried to put his car where a lamppost stands is a self-educated physicist.

I am basically a pretty good autodidact. I can teach myself things.

That was one of the most fundamental and sacred duties good friends and families performed for one another! They tended the flame of memory, so no one’s death meant an immediate vanishment from the world; in some sense the deceased would live on after their passing, at least as long as those who loved them lived. Such memories were an essential weapon against the chaos of life and death, a way to ensure some continuity from generation to generation, an order of endorsement and meaning.

Loss is the hardest thing, I said. But it's also the teacher that's the most difficult to ignore.