I can’t seem to fathom that the things important to me are not important to other people as well, and so I come off sounding like a missionary, someone whose job it is to convert rather than listen.
I see you that have a little swimming mouse.
You can’t brace yourself for famine if you’ve never known hunger.
I’d tried to straighten him out, but there’s only so much you can do for a person who thinks Auschwitz is a brand of beer.
My first semester I had only nine students. Hoping they might view me as professional and well prepared, I arrived bearing name tags fashioned in the shape of maple leaves.
People are often frightened of Parisians, but an American in Paris will find no harsher critic than another American.
All I do is lie, and that has made me immune to compliments.
My feet are completely flat, but for most of my life they were still shaped like feet. Now, thanks to bunions, they’re shaped more like states, wide boring ones that nobody wants to drive through.
Like anyone nostalgic for a time he didn’t live through, I chose to weed out the little inconveniences: polio, say, or the thought of eating stewed squirrel. The world was simply grander back then, somehow more civilized, and nicer to look at.
There seemed to be some correlation between devotion to God and a misguided zeal for marshmallows.
It’s safe to assume that by 2085 guns will be sold in vending machines but you won’t be able to smoke anywhere in America.
Sometimes the sins you haven’t committed are all you have left to hold onto.
Being locked up is one thing, but to have no concept of confinement, to be ignorant of its terms and never understand that struggle is useless – that’s what hell must be like.
He looked as though his life had not only passed him by but paused along the way to spit in his face.
Right, I breast feed baby camels in my backyard just for the freaking fun of it. Just tell me where you live, Pinocchio, and save the baloney for lunch.
Up close the city constitutes an oppressive series of staircases, but from a distance it inspires fantasies of wealth and power so profound that even our communists are temporarily rendered speechless.
Art isn’t about following the rules. It’s about breaking them.
In Paris you’re always surrounded by French people.
Neighbors would pass, and when they honked I’d remember that I was in my Speedo. Then I’d wrap my towel like a skirt around my waist and remind my sisters that this was not girlish but Egyptian, thank you very much.
High school taught me a valuable lesson about glasses: Don’t wear them. Contacts have always seemed like too much work, so instead I just squint, figuring that if something is more than ten feet away, I’ll just deal with it when I get there.