It's the Government's job to print the money, deliver the mail and declare war. Now give me my cigarettes.

to a Southerner it is faux pas, not sins, that matter in this world.

If whisky or salt won't cure it, then to hell with it. I worry about important things.

Agoraphobia was my quirky armor against a gregarious America.

American couples have gone to such lengths to avoid the interference of in-laws that they have to pay marriage counselors to interfere between them.

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.

When women talk about "privacy" they mean abortion rights, and the millions of words feminists have written about "a room of one'sown" refer to psychological space, rarely to physical solitude. For most women being alone is tantamount to being deserted.