Do you think it's funny to be so serious when I'm not even out of high school?' she asked. 'I don't see how it could be any other way,' said Lee. 'Laughter comes later, like wisdom teeth, and laughter at yourself comes last of all in a mad race with death, and sometimes it isn't in time.

What a frightening thing is the human, a mass of gauges and dials and registers, and we can only read a few and those perhaps not accurately.

Every man in a bank hates what the bank does and yet the bank does it.

Socialism never took root in America because the poor see themselves not as an exploited proletariat but as temporarily embarrassed millionaires.

I have thought that men and women should never come together except in bed. There is the only place where their natural hatred of each other is not so apparent.

Act out being alive, like a play. And after a while, a long while, it will be true.

For every man in the world functions to the best of his ability, and no one does less than his best, no matter what he may think about it.