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.

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.

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

Even at its most perceptive, sociology deals in abstractions.

One of the odd things about middle age, he concluded, was the strange decisions a man discovers he's made by not really making them, like allowing friends to drift away through simple neglect.

To weigh and evaluate a vast grid of information, much of it meaningless, and to arrive at sensible, if erroneous, conclusions, is a skill not to be sneezed at.

I just have this feeling that if it weren't for the Gloversville Free Library that I probably would not be a writer.