When I can no longer bear to think of the victims of broken homes, I begin to think of the victims of intact ones.

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

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.

A suburban mother's role is to deliver children obstetrically once, and by car forever after.

Sex in marriage is like medicine. Three times a day for the first week. Then once a day for another week. Then once every three or four days till the condition clears up.

This human nature is shabby stuff, as you may know from introspection.

We are nothing but a string of gut on a stick of bone riding this piece of astral soot for one piteous splinter of eternity.