Cleverness is a burden after that. You are supposed to settle down and be a good person, raise your children, and be good to your friends, which you may not have been back when you were clever.
What liberals must conserve is the middle class: the stable family who can afford to enjoy music and theater and take the kids to Europe someday and put money in the collection plate and save for college and keep up the home and be secure against catastrophe. This family has taken big hits in payroll taxes and loss of buying power and a certain suppressed panic about job security.
The living wander away, we don’t hear from them for months, years – but the dead move in with us to stay.
By God, no matter what Republicans say, the people of this country really do care about each other. We are not a cold people. By God, when John F. Kennedy said, “Ask what you can do for your country,” he spoke to this country’s heart and conscience.
They did not weave their lives around yours. They had their own lives, which were mysterious to you.
My own life would make a pretty dull story, I think, and I envy him as I drive to work on a cold Minnesota morning across the Mississippi River with its coal barges still struggling upstream like so many of us nowadays.
Couldn’t dance because it would awaken carnal desire, which in my case was not only awake, it was dressed and down on the corner waiting for the bus.
Do you think it’s right for Christians to use the names of pagan gods for the days of the week?
Woman: Did you know that women are smarter than men? Man: No, I didn’t. Woman: See what I mean?
I just sort of slid into it, like you’d go for a walk in the woods and fall into a crevasse and wind up in a cave full of rubies and emeralds.
Republicans are all about Old Glory and school prayer and the sanctity of marriage and the Fatherhood of God but when it comes to actually needing help from them, you shouldn’t get your hopes up. They might send an ambulance or they might just send a Get Well card.
What’s another word for “thesaurus”?
I feel like a blind man searching a dark room for a pair of black socks that aren’t there.
That’s what high school does for you: gives you some art and music and history so that even if you spend your life raising kids and writing computer programs, still there was a time when you argued about the First Amendment and talked about the Civil War and read Romeo and Juliet.
All the best of you is in the old tongue, but when you speak your best in America you become a yokel, a dumb Norskie, and when you speak English, an idiot.
Good old Norwegian cooking: you don’t read much about that, or about good old Norwegian hospitality.
Too many of my fellow Christians voted for selfishness and for degradation of the beautiful world God created. I guess they figured that by the time the planet was a smoky wasteland, they’d be nice and comfy in heaven, so wotthehell.
Going to church no more making you a Christian than standing in a garage makes you a car.
If you can’t trust your can open, then what?
If you can’t trust your can opener, then what? Is your wastebasket going to get you?
A major cause of injury to children is parents rushing to the scene. The panic reflex. Some children love to scream for the thrill of making immense people move fast. I remember that, on a quiet day, my sister and I in the backyard wondered, “Where’s Mom?” Upstairs, we thought. So I screamed, “MOM.” She made it down in two seconds. A good pair of wheels for an old lady.