A hundred years ago Hester Prynne of The Scarlet Letter was given an A for adultery; today she would rate no better than a C-plus.
There are times when parenthood seems nothing more than feeding the hand that bites you.
Pain is the question mark turned like a fishhook in the human heart.
The satirist shoots to kill while the humorist brings his prey back alive and eventually releases him again for another chance.
Everybody hates me because I’m so universally liked.
We are not primarily put on this earth to see through one another, but to see one another through.
Anyone informed that the universe is expanding and contracting in pulsations of eighty billion years has a right to ask. What’s in it for me?
Murals in restaurants are on a par with the food in museums.
We must love one another, yes, yes, that’s all true enough, but nothing says we have to like each other.
Sex in marriage is like medicine. Three times a day for the first week. Then once a day for another week. Then once every three or four days till the condition clears up.
Let us hope, I prayed, that a kind Providence will put a speedy end to the acts of God under which we have been laboring.
Every novel should have a beginning, a middle, and an end.
Life is a crowded superhighway with bewildering cloverleaf exits on which a man is liable to find himself speeding back in the direction he came.
We must love one another, yes, yes, that’s all true enough, but nothing says we have to like each other. It may be the very recognition of all men as our brothers that accounts for the sibling rivalry, and even enmity, we have toward so many of them.
Mrs Thicknesse and I agreed that a business of his own was probably the only solution for him because he was obviously unemployable.
You can make a sordid thing sound like a brilliant drawing-room comedy. Probably a fear we have of facing up to the real issues. Could you say we were guilty of Noel Cowardice?
Are you pro- or anti-macassar?
Try the Lamentations of Jeremiah. They always pick me up.
Exercise is an unnatural act.
If there’s anything I hate it’s the word humorist-I feel like countering with the word seriousist.
All couples must bear the strain of getting acquainted, having been, up to then, merely intimate.