You know how cats do. They hide to die. Dogs come home.

Because it's his bad luck to be the best.

We routinely leave our small children in day care among strangers. At the same time, in our guilt we evince paranoia about strangers and foster fear in children.

There is a common emotion we all recognize and have not yet named -- the happy anticipation of being able to feel contempt.

We rarely get to prepare ourselves in meadows or on graveled walks; we do it on short notice in places without windows, hospital corridors, rooms like this lounge with its cracked plastic sofa and Cinzano ashtrays, where the cafe curtains cover blank concrete. In rooms like this, with so little time, we prepare our gestures, get them by heart so we can do them when we're frightened in the face of Doom.

You will not persuade me with appeals to my intellectual vanity.

He was numb except for dreading the loss of numbness.