The Catholic Church with its foreshortened American history and tangled puritanical roots was as inviolate to my mother and father as it was to the last-ditch aristocrats of Evelyn Waugh.

The Golden Arches of McDonald's rise, glorious across the landscape, contempo-monolithic, simple in concept as Stonehenge if we could but see it.

There's a bad odor about a man who's been betrayed.

I like density, not volume. I like to leave something to the imagination. The reader must fit the pieces together, with the author's discreet help.

The part we play is not as we want it, but as we are made-with the genitals God gave us.

I've finally learned not to want things I cannot have.

Acceptance is the word we must substitute for dependence in dealing with the aged. Their acceptance of help, ours of their need.

None of the adults I knew ever touched in public, much less kneaded each others flesh.

Hindsight is common and bland as boiled potatoes.

To fear the bourgeois is bourgeois.

Wouldn't a laugh serve us better than to battle it out with our mortal souls?

But show me just this one thing, my darling, i seek a heart stained like a poppy flower.

Most people would succeed in small things if they were not troubled with great ambitions.

You choose happiness. You don't wait for it to choose you.

I'd never understood the injunction not to regret anything, couldn't see how that wasn't cowardice.

The man was running away with the rest, and selling his papers for a shilling each as he ran—a grotesque mingling of profit and panic.

I don't read reviews because by then it's too late - whatever anyone says, the book won't change. It is written.

Instead of inflicting upon us the judgment we deserved, God in Christ endured it in our place.

There was no glam squad, whatsoever. There were no dressing rooms. There were no bathrooms. Let's start at our base level. We didn't have toilet paper. We went to the woods to use the bathroom.

Tis an old lesson; time approves it true, And those who know it best, deplore it most; When all is won that all desire to woo, The paltry prize is hardly worth the cost.

I cannot teach you violence, as I do not myself believe in it. I can only teach you not to bow your heads before any one even at the cost of your life.