This is your dividing line, by the way, between child and nonchild - when the first trouble happens that Mama can't fix.

Gifts of time and love are surely the basic ingredients of a truly merry Christmas.

You don't get over hating to cook, any more than you get over having big feet.

Why does a slight tax increase cost you two hundred dollars and a substantial tax cut save you thirty cents?

Life is so very simple when you have no facts to confuse you.

What most of us are after, when we have a picture taken, is a good natural-looking picture that doesn't resemble us.

It is important to remember that these are your Declining Years, in which you can jolly well decline to do what you don't feel like doing, unless not doing it would make you feel worse than doing it.

the most all-around, practical, long-wearing illusions are the ones that you weave yourself.

It's easier to find a traveling companion than to get rid of one.

As millions of women have done before me, I pulled domesticity over my head like a blanket and found I was still cold.

it isn't true, by the way, that nothing is as bad as you think it's going to be. Some things are exactly as bad as you thought they were going to be, and some things are worse.

No, my life is not this precipitous hourthrough which you see me passing at a run.

It makes me sad when I see things that are just the same technology; you aren't passing the technology forward.

What is the future you're creating right now?

I think that people can fall in love with someone who is not of their own generation.

Innocence has nothing to dread.

In light of the Abu Ghraib prison scandal, critics are arguing that abuses of Iraqi prisoners are being produced by a climate of disregard for the laws of war.

You cannot describe truly what you are but you can enjoy and directly experience what you are. Therein lies the joy of existence.

I hated singing and getting up in front of crowds.

Nothing has changed since I began. My eye has permitted no change. I am going to keep things like this.