too many maniacs not enough michelangelos

The thing that I do try to convey is, don't do what I did - but ask what I asked.

True wisdom gives the only possible answer at any given moment, and that night, going back to bed was the only possible answer.

God isn't interested in watching you enact some performance of personality in order to comply with some crackpot notion you have about how a spiritual person looks or behaves. We all seem to get this idea that, in order to be sacred, we have to make some massive, dramatic change of character, that we have to renounce our individuality.

In order for marriage to endure it has to change along with us, and it does that very graciously. And in the end I find there is something kind of moving about it: the fact that people continue to insist on choosing somebody to build a life with.

So when modern-day religious conservatives wax nostalgic about how marriage is a sacred tradition that reaches back into history for thousands of uninterrupted years, they are absolutely correct, but in only one respect-only if they happen to be talking about Judaism.

In a world of disorder and disaster and fraud, sometimes only beauty can be trusted. Only artistic excellence is incorruptible. Pleasure cannot be bargained down. And sometimes the meal is the only currency that is real.