Much as a teacher may wince at the thought, he is also an entertainer—for unless he can hold his audience, he cannot really instruct or edify them.

Knowledge fills a large brain; it merely inflates a small one.

Norbert Blei is a writer the way people used to be troubadours and minstrels, celebrating what he has seen and heart and felt in a deceptively simple style reminiscent of the early Sherwood Anderson. . . . Like Anderson, he is a lover, and his affection invests his writing with a singular charm.

The beauty of 'spacing' children many years apart lies in the fact that parents have time to learn the mistakes that were made with the older ones - which permits them to make exactly the opposite mistakes with the younger ones.

Real loneliness consists not in being alone, but in being with the wrong person, in the suffocating darkness of a room in which no deep communication is possible.

Almost every man looks more so in a belted trench coat.

This is a lesson mankind has not yet learned. We identify, and stratify, and treat persons largely on the basis of their accidental (physical) characteristics, which have no deeper meaning.