Immortality is a chancy thing; it cannot be promised or earned. Perhaps it cannot even be identified for what it is.

I may not be sure if monsters exist, but I’d rather live my life in doubt than be persuaded by a real experience of one.

That's what misbehavior is all about, just a little extra loving being asked for.

How deeply bound by cords of family anger we all are[...]None of us breaks free.

...the reasons just reassemble themselves in different patterns every time I think about it.

Such silly things, children -- and so embarrassing -- because they keep changing themselves out of shame, out of a need to be loved or something. While animals are born who they are, accept it, and that is that. They live with greater peace than people do.

While I pride myself on trying to be creative in all areas of my life, I have occasionally gone overboard, like the time I decided to bring to a party a salad that I constructed, on a huge rattan platter, to look like a miniature scale model of the Gardens of Babylon.