Traditions are the guideposts driven deep in our subconscious minds. The most powerful ones are those we can’t even describe and aren’t even aware of.
My father used to say that if a man fools you once, he’s a jerk. If he fools you twice, you’re a jerk. Only he didn’t use the word “jerk.”
Age is an accumulation of life and loss. Adulthood is a series of lines crossed.
Values are not trendy items that are casually traded in.
When you live alone, you can be sure that the person who squeezed the toothpaste tube in the middle wasn’t committing a hostile act.
Civility, it is said, means obeying the unenforceable.
Let’s just say that global warming deniers are now on a par with Holocaust deniers.
Ultimately, time is all you have and the idea isn’t to save it, but to savour it.
It is, I suppose, the business of grandparents to create memories and the relative of memories: traditions. We want to lodge moments, like snapshots, in the fleeting video of time.
She goes in with a prejudice and comes out with a statistic.
I regard this novel as a work without redeeming social value, unless it can be recycled as a cardboard box.
Once upon a time we were just plain people. But that was before we began having relationships with mechanical systems. Get involved with a machine and sooner or later you are reduced to a factor.
You can fire your secretary, divorce your spouse, abandon your children. But they remain your co-authors forever.
Our ‘mistakes’ become our crucial parts, sometimes our best parts, of the lives we have made.
I would like to say we’re at a point where global warming is impossible to deny. Let’s just say that global warming deniers are now on a par with Holocaust deniers, though one denies the past and the other denies the present and future.
Parents remain our touchstones, fellow travelers, even after death. They are both missing and present.
You can teach someone who cares to write columns, but you can’t teach someone who writes columns to care.
When we describe what the other person is really like, I suppose we often picture what we want. We look through the prism of our need.
Today, much of journalism and politics are in a kind of collusion to oversimplify and personalize issues. No room for ambivalence. Plenty of room for the personal attack.
All in all, I am not surprised that the people who want to unravel the social contract start with young adults. Those who are urged to feel afraid, very afraid, have both the greatest sense of independence and the most finely honed skepticism about government.