There are times when parenthood seems nothing more than feeding the hand that bites you.

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

We turned on one another deep, drowned gazes, and exchanged a kiss that reduced my bones to rubber and my brain to gruel.

The idea of a Supreme Being who creates a world in which one creature is designed to eat another in order to subsist, and then pass a law saying, "Thou shalt not kill," is so monstrously, immeasurably, bottomlessly absurd that I am at a loss to understand how mankind has entertained or given it house room all this long.

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.

The satirist shoots to kill while the humorist brings his prey back alive and eventually releases him again for another chance.