the prison system, inherently unjust and inhumane, is the ultimate expression of injustice and inhumanity in the society at large.

Things on the whole are faster in America; people don't stand for election, they run for office. If a person says he's sick, it doesn't mean regurgitating, it means ill. Mad means angry, not insane. Don't ask for the left-luggage; it's called a checkroom.

I have nothing against undertakers personally. It's just that I wouldn't want one to bury my sister.

Funeralese has had its ups and downs. The word 'morticians,' first used in Embalmers Monthly for February, 1895, was barred by the Chicago Tribune in 1932, 'not for lack of sympathy with the ambition of undertakers to be well regarded, but because of it. If they haven't the sense to save themselves from their own lexicographers, we shall not be guilty of abetting them in their folly.

Society created the prison in its own image; will history, with its penchant for paradox, reverse those roles?

Now there is a society where the funeral industry got completely out of control.

Knowing few children of my age with whom to compare notes, I envied the children of literature to whom interesting things were always happening.