After all, what was the whole wide world but a place for people to yearn for their heart's impossible desires, for those desires to become entrenched in defiance of logic, plausibility, and even the passage of time, as eternal as polished marble.

...aware, as always, that the truth isn't much of substitute for a good answer.

People sometimes get in the habit of being loyal to a mistake.

It's possible to overlook character flaws of in-laws for the simple reason that you feel neither responsible for them nor genetically implicated.

Who but an English professor would threaten to kill a duck a day and hold up a goose as an example?

I don't think America has ever had a center the way London is the center of England or Dublin is the center of Ireland.

I'm not an easy man. I can be an entertaining one, though it's been my experience that most people don't want to be entertained. They want to be comforted.