Ours is a society in which secrets of private life that, formerly, you would have given nearly anything to conceal, you now clamor to get on a television show to reveal.

Sanity is a cozy lie.

A family's photograph album is generally about the extended family and, often, is all that remains of it.

The taste for quotations (and for the juxtaposition of incongruous quotations) is a Surrealist taste.

A fiction about soft or easy deaths is part of the mythology of most diseases that are not considered shameful or demeaning.

What is the most beautiful in virile men is something feminine; what is most beautiful in feminine women is something masculine.

I haven't been everywhere, but it's on my list.

In place of a hermeneutics we need an erotics of art.

Surrealism in painting amounted to little more than the contents of a meagerly stocked dream world: a few witty fantasies, mostly wet dreams and agoraphobic nightmares.

It is easier to endure than to change. But once one has changed, what was endured is hard to recall.

A large part of the popularity and persuasiveness of psychology comes from its being a sublimated spiritualism: a secular, ostensibly scientific way of affirming the primacy of "spirit" over matter.

The secret self knows the anguish of our attachments and assures us that letting go of what we think we must have to be happy is the same as letting go of our unhappiness.

A red leaf danced from a branch like a dropping flame, down into the calm blue lake. A gust had broken it free. There was a cold bite in the wind. It was now deep autumn in the mountains.

Fleas can be taught nearly anything that a Congressman can.

Sir, I am no sycophant or worshipper of power anywhere.

More than 70 percent of seniors are asking for more time. It is long overdue for Congress to listen and make sure that seniors have a prescription drug plan that works for them.

Nature has left nothing to the mercy of man.

As he that fears God fears nothing else, so he that sees God sees everything else.

What was this big sound bite, though, at the time? It was, "Will Donald Trump and his supporters accept the election results." He won.

Action must be taken at once, there is no time to be lost.

But like the rest of the country, Maine has reached an impasse, for most of the mercury that fouls our skies, waters and land comes from outside our borders.