I'll tell you one thing, though. It's a terrible thing to be a disappointment to a good woman.

There are a great many sins in this world, none of them original.

Not everyone writes well from a child's point of view.

You can't possibly judge your ability to control something until you've experienced the extremes of its capabilities. Do you understand?

Worse, I have to admit to feeling the jealousy of one crab for another that has managed to climb out of the barrel.

As I drift back into sleep, I can't help thinking that it's a wonderful thing to be right about the world. To weigh the evidence, always incomplete, and correctly intuit the whole, to see the world in a grain of sand, to recognize its beauty, its simplicity, its truth. It's as close as we get to God in this life, and reside in the glow of such brief flashes of understanding, fully awake, sometimes for two or three seconds, at peace with our existence. And then back to sleep we go.

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