The father of a daughter is nothing but a high-class hostage. A father turns a stony face to his sons, berates them, shakes his antlers, paws the ground, snorts, runs them off into the underbrush, but when his daughter puts her arm over his shoulder and says, 'Daddy, I need to ask you something,' he is a pat of butter in a hot frying pan.

They say such nice things about people at their funerals that it makes me sad that I'm going to miss mine by just a few days.

The highlight of my childhood was making my brother laugh so hard that food came out of his nose.

A man can't eat anger for breakfast and sleep with it at night and not suffer damage to his soul.

We live a pleasant life shopping at the Food Shoppe . . . taking the kids to the Weinery-Beanery, . . . and eating bran flakes . .. and then, with no warning, we wake up one morning stricken with middle age, full of loneliness, dumb, in pain. Our work is useless, our vocation is lost, and nobody cares about us at all. This is not bearable. In despair, we go do something spectacularly dumb, like run away with Amber the cocktail waitress, and suddenly all the women in our life look at us with unmitigated disgust.

Thank you, God, for this good life and forgive us if we do not love it enough.

She gave him such a look... Man oh man, if looks could kill. That one might have totalled a city block.