If one's friends do not openly laugh at him, they are not in fact his friends.

Another way to be awakened by the beauty and complexity of the word is to get a dog. Small Things like a plant that I had passed a thousand time and never given a second thought to. But the dog is curious. And the dog stops and wants to smell this and smell that. And the dog makes you look and focus and take the time.

Vladimir Nabokov said the two great evils of the 20th century were Marx and Freud. He was absolutely correct.

How passionately we love everything that cannot last: the dazzling crystallory of winter, the spring in bloom, the fragile flight of butterflies, crimson sunsets, a kiss, and life.

To many people, free will is a license to rebel not against what is unjust or hard in life but against what is best for them and true.

For some, the past is a chain, each day a link, raveling backward to one ringbolt or another, in one dark place or another, and tomorrow is a slave to yesterday.

Where there's cake, there's hope. And there's always cake.