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

lifelong enemies are, I think, as hard to make and as important to one's well-being as lifelong friends.

Things on the whole are much faster in America; people don't 'stand for election', they 'run for office.'

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.

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

[On the United States:] A nation which does not appreciate that the simple elocution exercise 'Merry Mary married hairy Harry' contains not one but three vowel sounds.

When is conduct a crime, and when is a crime not a crime? When "Somebody Up There" - a monarch, a dictator, a Pope, a legislator - so decrees.