The masculine imagination lives in a state of perpetual revolt against the limitations of human life. In theological terms, one might say that all men, left to themselves, become gnostics. They may swagger like peacocks, but in their heart of hearts they all think sex an indignity and wish they could beget themselves on themselves. Hence the aggressive hostility toward women so manifest in most club-car stories.

Christmas and Easter can be subjects for poetry, but Good Friday, like Auschwitz, cannot. The reality is so horrible it is not surprising that people should have found it a stumbling block to faith.

To be happy means to be free, not from pain or fear, but from care or anxiety.

The countenances of children, like those of animals, are masks, not faces, for they have not yet developed a significant profile of their own.

The older lives like not to be stood in rows or at right angles.

What answer to the meaning of existence should one require beyond the right to exercise one's gifts?

Weep for the lives your wishes never led.