He resented such questions as people do who have thought a great deal about them. The superficial and slipshod have ready answers, but those looking this complex life straight in the eye acquire a wealth of perception so composed of delicately balanced contradictions that they dread, or resent, the call to couch any part of it in a bland generalization. The vanity (if not outrage) of trying to cage this dance of atoms in a single definition may give the weariness of age with the cry of youth for answers the appearance of boredom.

Why is the awfulness of families such a popular reason for starting another?

The universe is like a safe to which there is a combination. But the combination is locked up in the safe.

I can still hear my mother wailing over some new kitchen crisis, "Oh God," and my father answering cozily from the silo, "Were you calling me, dear?

Everybody hates me because I'm so universally liked.

What we are assigned to bear is in a sense a measure of our stature.

I was thinking that we all learn by experience, but some of us have to go to summer school.