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

The other possibility was that there was no right thing to say, that the choice wasn't between right and wrong but between wrong, more wrong, and as wrong as you can get.

Was anything in the world truer than that intuitive leap of the heart?

I can be glib and truthful all at once.

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.

Were it not for Occam's Razor, which always demands simplicity, I'd be tempted to believe that human beings are more influenced by distant causes than immediate ones. This would especially be true of overeducated people, who are capable of thinking past the immediate, of becoming obsessed by the remote. It's the old stuff, the conflicts we've never come to terms with, that sneaks up on us, half forgotten, insisting upon action.

America has always been a nation of small places, and as we lose them, we're losing part of ourselves.