Showing up at school already able to read is like showing up at the undertaker's already embalmed: people start worrying about being put out of their jobs.

Oppressed people are treacherous for the simple reason that treachery is both a means of survival and a way to curry favor with one's oppressor.

If we define a misanthrope as 'someone who does not suffer fools and likes to see fools suffer,' we have described a person with something to look forward to.

The vitamin has been reified. A chemical intangible originally defined as a unit of nutritive value, it was long ago reified into a pill. Now it is a pill; no one except a few precise scientists define it as anything else. Once the vitamin became a pill, it became real according to the precepts of American Cartesianism: I swallow it, therefore it is.

God may have loved the common people, but a trip to any shopping mall suggests that He made far too many of them.

Updike's style is an exquisite blend of Melville and Austen: reading him is like cutting through whale blubber with embroidery scissors.

Wit goes for the jugular, not the jocular, and it's the opposite of football; instead of building character, it tears it down.