the whole point of muck-raking, apart from all the jokes, is to try to do something about what you've been writing about. You may not be able to change the world but at least you can embarrass the guilty.

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

A thirteen-year-old is a kaleidoscope of different personalities, if not in most ways a mere figment of her own imagination. At that age, what and who you are depends largely on what book you happen to be reading at the moment.

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

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.

It is somehow reassuring to discover that the word travel is derived from travail, denoting the pains of childbirth.

Prison walls are meant not only to keep convicts in, but to keep the would-be investigator out.