Glenda Adams has written a wicked and witty novel.

A chaplain's biggest gift is to be present and just listen.

Statuettes of drunken sailors, velvet pictures of island maidens, plastic seashell lamps made in Taiwan. What contempt the people who think up souvenirs have for other people.

Not having to own a car has made me realize what a waste of time the automobile is.

Women have the feeling that since they didn't make the rules, the rules have nothing to do with them.

Laughter is the jam on the toast of life. It adds flavor, keeps it from being too dry, and makes it easier to swallow.

...is this not in fact the purpose of young Americans going abroad? To make them think of things they never thought of?

The whole process of writing a novel is having this great, beautiful idea and then spoiling it.

In what we think of as bad dialogue, the characters talk directly to each other.

But novels are never about what they are about; that is, there is always deeper, or more general, significance. The author may not be aware of this till she is pretty far along with it.

Any essayist setting out on a frail apparatus of notings and jottings is a brave person.

So long as I believe I have to do certain things I will just go right ahead. That's how I run my life.

The past with its pleasures its rewards its foolishness its punishments is there for each of us forever and it should be.

The way that I've always gone about making music, the rule of thumb, has just been to make what I love.

We become just by the practice of just actions.

I have lots of fiction in the drawer, but the essays I mostly kick out into the world, ready or not. Fiction incubates differently, I suppose.

In this world, shipmates, sin that pays its way can travel freely, and without passport; whereas Virtue, if a pauper, is stopped at all frontiers.

Untouchability is a many-headed monster and forms, some of them so subtle as not to be easily detected.

Standardization does not produce although admirable as an efficiency method.

We're all in the game. We all drive cars, and we're all hooked on oil. The question is how we can get unhooked before we drown in the stuff.

Incessant company is as bad as solitary confinement.