Any piece of furniture, I don't care how beautiful it is, has got to be lived with, and kicked about, and rubbed down, and mistreated by servants, and repolished, and knocked around and dusted and sat on or slept in or eaten off of before it develops its real character ... A good deal like human beings.

Anything can have happened in Oklahoma. Practically everything has.

It's terrible to realize that you don't learn how to live until you're ready to die; and, then it's too late.

To be alive is a fine thing. It is the finest thing in the world, though hazardous. It is a unique thing. It happens only once in a lifetime. To be alive, to know consciously that you are alive, and to relish that knowledge -- this is a kind of magic. Or it may be a kind of madness, exhilarating but harmless.

But I have felt that to be a Jew was, in some ways at least, to be especially privileged.

Being an old maid is like death by drowning, a really delightful sensation after you cease to struggle.

You lose in the end unless you know how the wheel is fixed or can fix it yourself.