Once we hit forty, women only have about four taste buds left: one for vodka, one for wine, one for cheese, and one for chocolate.

How about "diamonds are a girl's best friends"? Nope. It should be switched around and pointed out, instead, that your best friends are diamonds.

There are two kinds of people in the world: those who like what they like more than they don't like what they don't like and, in contrast, those who don't like what they don't like more than they like what they like.

Anger is the quintessential individual-signature emotion: I am what makes me mad.

We should remind ourselves that laughing together is as close as you can get to another person without touching, and sometimes it represents a closer tie than touching ever could.

Fear looks both ways but still refuses to cross; fear looks twice and still doesn't leap. ... Fear usually arrives late, inevitably leaves early, and ends up never going out of town at all. Fear is the phantom hand on the back of the neck and the sound of a door opening downstairs when no one is coming home. ... Fear grows poor because it watches others gain wealth but cannot enter the fray; fear grows sick because it eats away at heath even as it fears its diminishment; fear grows old watching others live in ways that seem to threaten-but in reality only enhance-life.

I am constantly surprised that the simple word 'feminism' raises more eyebrows and initiates more sad-faced head-shaking than any elaborate stream of invective I have ever leveled at either the I.R.S. or the D.M.V.