Of all the virtues, discretion began to seem the most rewarding: it kept people guessing and sometimes, by default, admiring.

It's odd to spend your vacation with someone else's music especially when you're alone. You're free to let loose, unobserved, but someone else has chosen the words you belt out in private, the rythms you can dance to like a fool.

When it comes to life, we spin our own yarn, and where we end up is really, in fact, where we always intended to be.

And then there's the personal question so many of Lassie's fans want to ask: Is he allowed on the furniture? Of course he is-but, then, he's the one who paid for it.

But things change, of course, and so do the ways in which people see themselves.

All I meant was that people take their same old lives wherever they go. No place is perfect enough to strip you of that. And some places have a way of magnifying your demons, or of, I don't know, giving them pep pills.

I, too, seem to be a connoisseur of rain, but it does not fill me with joy; it allows me to steep myself in a solitude I nurse like a vice I've refused to vanquish.