What good is a planet called Earth, after all, if you own no land?

You can't help it but you were born without a heart. At least you tried to believe what the people with hearts believed — so you were a good man just the same.

I have this disease late at night sometimes, involving alcohol and the telephone.

All this happened, more or less.

Billy covered his head with his blanket. He always covered his head when his mother came to see him in the mental ward - always got much sicker until she went away. It wasn’t that she was ugly, or had bad breath or a bad personality. She was a perfectly nice, standard-issue, brown-haired, white woman with a high school education. She upset Billy simply by being his mother. She made him feel embarrassed and ungrateful and weak because she had gone through so much trouble to give him life, and to keep that life going, and Billy didn’t really like life at all.

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

If a person survives an ordinary span of sixty years or more, there is every chance that his or her life as a shapely story has ended and all that remains to be experienced is epilogue. Life is not over, but the story is.