My friend Phil has a theory that the Lord, having made teenagers, felt constrained to make amends and so created the golden retriever.

I am hoping for better times. That's how you know us hapless gardeners - by our dirty fingernails and our absurd, unquenchable optimism about next year.

[On men:] On their best days, the best of them are eight years old.

[On Senator Everett Dirksen:] His great enemy was boredom and he won every engagement.

Anyone who has undergone home repair lately knows that your everyday artisan uses language so loosely and makes false promises so glibly as to make your politicians, even the presidential candidate, seem like a model of accuracy and rectitude. 'Be there Wednesday at nine,' the workman will tell you. It is a lie. He is humoring you. He says it to silence you, the way you tell a child you will take it to Disneyland if it will stop crying.

And the propensity of weak and empty people to follow a leader into the darkness from which there is no return is still flourishing, as ever.

[On George H.W. Bush vs. Michael Dukakis:] Americans now know they can vote for a man who can't express his thoughts or a man who can't express his feelings.