There is a fundamental difference, however, between asking to be permitted to keep a vegetative relative on costly machinery, and asking the taxpayers or society as a whole to pay for such machinery.

Nothing sells tombstones like a Girl Scout in uniform.

The most dangerous ideas are not those that challenge the status quo. The most dangerous ideas are those so embedded in the status quo, so wrapped in a cloud of inevitability, that we forget they are ideas at all.

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.

Maybe life involves the pairing of unsuitable people, those who wait and those who keep others waiting, and the key to happiness is finding the one person with whom you share the same internal chronometer.

A free society, to be truly worthy of that name, owes healthy, competent individuals the right to end their lives on their own terms.

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.