A purpose of human life, no matter who is controlling it, is to love whoever is around to be loved.

We were German-Americans in a British colony, so we were outsiders.

There is a riddle about a man who is locked in a room with nothing but a bed and a calendar, and the question is: How does he survive? The answer is: He eats dates from the calendar and drinks from the springs of the bed.

Moderate giftedness has been made worthless by the printing press and radio and television and satellites and all that. A moderately gifted person who would have been a community treasure a thousand years ago has to give up, has to go into some other line of work, since modern communications put him or her into daily competition with nothing but world's champions.

Don't worry about your father. He's a perfectly contented, self-sufficient zombie.

The nicest veterans in Schenectady, I thought, the kindest and funniest ones, the ones who hated war the most, were the ones who'd really fought.

Life happens too fast for you ever to think about it. If you could just persuade people of this, but they insist on amassing information.