Nothing seems to matter quite as much. I no longer think about death in the concentrated way I once did. I don't know? you get so old and you sort of give up in some way. You've had your period of angst, your period of religious desperation, and you've arrived at a philosophical position where you don't need, or you can't bear, to look at it.

The great thing about the dead, they make space.

The scissors cut the long-grown hair; The razor scrapes the remnant fuzz. Small-jawed, weak-chinned, big-eyed, I stare At the forgotten boy I was.

What is the past, after all, but a vast sheet of darkness in which a few moments, pricked apparently at random, shine?

The New England spirit does not seek solutions in a crowd; raw light and solitariness are less dreaded than welcomed as enhancers of our essential selves.

I love my government not least for the extent to which it leaves me alone.

Why does one never hear of government funding for the preservation and encouragement of comic strips, girlie magazines and TV soap operas? Because these genres still hold the audience they were created to amuse and instruct.