A compassionate conservative is someone who electrocutes juveniles but lets them have a last 'make a wish'.

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.

Powdermilk biscuits: Heavens, theyre tasty and expeditious! Theyre made from whole wheat, to give shy persons the strength to get up and do what needs to be done

When the New Yorker turned down work, they turned it down in such an elaborately gentlemanly way making apologies for their own shortsightedness. Undoubtedly it was their fault but somehow for some reason this fell short of the remarkably high standard that you by your own work have set for yourself. They had a way of rejecting my work that made me feel sorry for them somehow.

Sometimes you have to avoid mentioning things because people's feelings are tender.

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.

A minister has to be able to read a clock. At noon, it's time to go home and turn up the pot roast and get the peas out of the freezer.