What makes us want to know the worst? Is it that we tire of preferring to know the best? Does curiosity always hurdle self-interest? Or is it, more simply, that wanting to know the worst is love's favorite perversion.

Life isn't just addition and subtraction. There's also the accumulation, the multiplication, of loss, of failure.

You can define a net two ways, depending on your point of view. Normally you would say it is a meshed instrument designed to catch fish. But you could, with no great injury to logic, reverse the image and define the net as a jocular lexicographer once did: he called it a collection of holes tied together with string.

Most people, in my opinion, steal much of what they are. If they didn't what poor items they would be.

But life never lets you go, does it? You can't put down life the way you put down a book.

When I was still quite young I had a complete presentiment of life. It was like the nauseating smell of cooking escaping from a ventilator: you don't have to have eaten it to know that it would make you throw up.

Irony - The modern mode: either the devil’s mark or the snorkel of sanity.