Through my college years, topping that ridge had always given me a great sense of being home, but time had diminished the emotion and I had begun to suspect that home was less a place than an empty page.

Only a rank degenerate would drive 1,500 miles across Texas without eating a chicken fried steak.

Anyway, whacking a surly bartender ain't much of a crime.

Uva uvum vivendo varia fit

Self-parody is the first portent of age.

There isn't a thought in my head I care to be alone with for more than five minutes.

Working- and Middle-class families sat down at the dinner table every night - the shared meal was the touchstone of good manners. Indeed, that dinner table was the one time when we were all together, every day: parents, grandparents, children, siblings. Rudeness between siblings, or a failure to observe the etiquette of passing dishes to one another, accompanied by "please" and "thank you," was the training ground of behavior, the place where manners began.