Even a poor tour guide is entitled to some happiness.

Know your load. That's rule numero uno in this business, which is why I make them count the penguins out in front of me one at a time. I'm not going to be the schmuck who shows up in Orlando twobirds short of a dinner party....I know I'm pulling out of Houston with exactly forty-two Gentoo penguins, seventeen Jamaican land iguanas, four tuataras from New Zealand, and a pair of rare, civet-like mammals called linsangs. No more, no less.

Depression and hopelessness are not the only reasons terminally ill patients wish to end their lives. Many individuals see nothing undignified about choosing to end their lives at the time and manner of their choosing - and many view such a choice as the meaningful culmination of a good life.

Marriage is like a series of opposing reflections, inverse images getting ever smaller like nesting dolls, each one of your trying to squeeze yourself smaller to fit inside the hopes of the other, until one of you cracks or stops existing.

I would prefer to believe that a market in fetal organs would empower women to use their reproductive capabilities to their own economic advantage.

I am grateful that I have rights in the proverbial public square - but, as a practical matter, my most cherished rights are those that I possess in my bedroom and hospital room and death chamber.

I can handle being married for my money; it's being married for my life insurance that gives me pause.