Some lives are tragic, some ridiculous. Most are both at once.

Proverbs save us the trouble of thinking. What we call folk wisdom is often no more than a kind of expedient stupidity.

The world of employer and employee, like that of master and slave, debases both.

By the age of forty, a man is responsible for his face. And his fate.

Alaska is our biggest, buggiest, boggiest state. Texas remains our largest unfrozen state. But mountainous Utah, if ironed out flat, would take up more space on a map than either.

I have written much about many good places. But the best places of all, I have never mentioned.

One can imagine a sane, healthy, cheerful human society based on no more than the principles of common sense, as validated each day by work, play, and living experience. But this remains the most utopian and fantastic of ideals.