The snag about marriage is, it isn´t worth the divorce.

My mother is a firm believer in the long pause, useful in interrogations, proclamations of truth, and the occasional cutting dead of someone without their knowing it.

Delusion detests focus and romance provides the veil.

I mentally bless and exonerate anyone who has kicked a chair out from beneath her or swallowed opium in large chunks. My mind has met their environment, here in the void. I understand perfectly.

In so many senseless deaths, beauty is to blame.

Why is edamame always ready to expire? It´s so urgent for a vegetable. Edamame. It sounds like an assisted form of suicide. Is there an advertising concept in this?

I used to loathe ambivalence now I adore it. Ambivalence is my new best friend.

They feel life is for the taking, and that everyone deserves happiness no matter what the cost. I must remember these tricks if I ever decide to have my soul surgically removed.

Surprises, I feel now, are primarily a form of violence.

I love you as the mother of my child": the kiss of death.Mother of His Child: demotion. I am beginning to see this truism: Mothers are not always wives. I have been stripped of a piece of self.

He announces that lately he keeps losing things. "Like your wife and child, " I want to say, but don´t. At fourty, I´ve learned not to say everything clever, not to score every point.

Boys fight the wars. We’d have the brotherhood of man tomorrow if the politicians had to get out and fight.

Be strong and courageous. Fear not! God will grant you the strength to overcome any adversity.

Remain close to government and away from politics. It means deal more with the authorities. And less with individuals.

It feels great to be a role model and I'm very careful with the things I do. I'm not perfect, I do make a lot of mistakes, but I try my best.

It's more interesting to put yourself in the place of Bette Davis than Irene Dunne, I guess.

Both formerly and now, it is only suffering that I describe, and the cessation of suffering.

I am quite content to come home and go to Farming, be a select Man, and owe no Man any Thing but good Will. There I can get a little health and teach my Boys to be Lawyers.

[Children] would have messed up my apartment. In the main, they are ungrateful. They would have siphoned too much time away from the writing of my precious books.

You see something you like?

Then I strip the pants away from each leg, like peeling a banana. That's it, the perfect metaphor: peeling a banana.