If watching television doesn’t hasten death, it surely manages to make death very inviting; for television so shamelessly sentimentalizes and romanticizes death that it makes the living feel they have missed something – just by staying alive.
The gardener had a dread of small women; he’d always imagined them to have an anger disproportionate to their size.
He wished he could arrange a maiming as a kind of moral lesson.
I have learned that the consequences of our past actions are always interesting; I have learned to view the present with a forward-looking eye.
Life is an X-rated soap opera.
Thus we try to keep our heroes alive; hence we remember them.
How we love to love things for other people; how we love to have other people love things through our eyes.
When time passes, it’s the people who knew you whom you want to see; they’re the ones you can talk to. When enough time passes, what’s it matter what they did to you?
Nothing moves at the Hotel New Hampshire! We’re screwed down here-for life!
He had in abundance youth’s most dangerous qualities: optimism and relentlessness. He would risk everything he had to fly the plane that could carry the bomb within him.
In a school community, someone who reads a book for some secretive purpose, other than discussing it, is strange. What was she reading for?
Just because you’re sober, don’t think you’re a good driver, Cookie.
O God – please give him back! I shall keep asking You.
People are either attracted to the unseemly or disapproving of it, or both; yet we try to sound superior to the unseemly by pretending to be amused by it or indifferent to it.
Whereas she wished more of the population were better educated, she also believed that education was largely wasted on the majority of the people she met.
He was too young to know that, in any novel with a reasonable amount of forethought, there were no coincidences.
Being reviewed is being condescended to by your inferiors.
Kids are perfect people till grownups get their hands on them.
Just when you begin thinking of yourself as memorable, you run into someone who can’t even remember having met you.
Life forces enough final decisions on us. We should have the sense to avoid as many of the unnecessary ones as we can.