... life itself is brief, and that is what charges the day with such ridiculous beauty.

Some luck lies in not getting what you thought you wanted but getting what you have, which once you have got it you may be smart enough to see is what you would have wanted had you known.

In Lake Wobegon, we don't forget mistakes.

Vacation cruises are advertised as luxurious journeys to exotic places, but a chief pleasure is the reading of books ... . On steamer chairs topside or poolside, in the lounges, everywhere you see men and women with their noses in books, devouring them for hours.

To choose Norm Coleman over Walter Mondale is like going to a great steakhouse and ordering the tuna sandwich.

Librarians, Dusty, possess a vast store of politeness. These are people who get asked regularly the dumbest questions on God's green earth. These people tolerate every kind of crank and eccentric and mouth breather there is.

When you're in your 20s, your 30s, even, you have - at least, I had - vast ambitions, and you sit around mooning about these things, and you're depressed, because you haven't done them. And it takes you a long time to come to the realization that if you can't be John Updike, well, then, you can't.