When all else fails, give up and go to the library.

A person can go along quite awhile if they get a good day every once and again.

They're animals, all right. But why are you so goddam sure that makes us human beings?

Even people capable of living in the past don't really know what the future holds.

I guess when you turn off the main road, you have to be prepared to see some funny houses.

At the time we’re stuck in it, like hostages locked in a Turkish bath, high school seems the most serious business in the world to just about all of us. It’s not until the second or third class reunion that we start realizing how absurd the whole thing was.

It was how wars really ended, Dieffenbaker supposed -- not at truce tables but in cancer wards and office cafeterias and traffic jams. Wars died one tiny piece at a time, each piece something that fell like a memory, each lost like an echo that fades in winding hills. In the end even war ran up the white flag. Or so he hoped. He hoped that in the end even war surrendered.