“What you don’t necessarily realize when you start selling your time by the hour is that what you’re really selling is your life.”

From an entertainment point of view, the Solar System has been a bust. None of the planets turns out to have any real-estate potential, and most of them are probably even useless for filming Dune sequels.

As anyone knows who has ever had to set up a military encampment or build a village from the ground up, occupations pose staggering logistical problems.

I complain to one of my fellow servers that I don’t understand how she can go so long without food. “Well, I don’t understand how you can go so long without a cigarette,” she responds in a tone of reproach. Because work is what you do for others; smoking is what you do for yourself.

Upscale young men seem to go for the kind of woman who plays with a full deck of credit cards, who won’t cry when she’s knocked to the ground while trying to board the six o clock Eastern shuttle, and whose schedule doesn’t allow for a sexual encounter lasting more than twelve minutes.

Whether you work outside the home or not, never tell them [your children] that being a mommy is your ‘job.’ Being a mommy is a relationship, not a profession.

Call it ‘nationalism’ when you affix a flag to your car, and leave the word ‘patriotism’ for your efforts to make this country a kinder, more egalitarian place, and one that is less dangerous to the rest of the world.

The war with Iraq … had to be one of the greatest non sequiturs in military history. Attacked by a gang composed largely of Islamic militants from Saudi Arabia, the United States countered by invading an unrelated country, and one of the most secular in the Middle East at that.

People tend to judge presidents on how the economy performs, and yet we don’t expect them to have the power to do much about it. Or we don’t want them to exercise that power, if they were to have it.

Employers have gone away from the idea that an employee is a long-term asset to the company, someone to be nurtured and developed, to a new notion that they are disposable.

To live in poverty is to live with constant uncertainty, to accept galling indignities, and to expect harassment by the police, welfare officials and employers, as well as by others who are poor and desperate.

Once you do lose a job, there are not a lot of social supports for you. You lose health insurance because we have this absurd system in America where health insurance is usually tied to employment. Your income dips. And that’s when you get into selling the house.

What would it mean in practice to eliminate all the ‘negative people’ from one’s life [as demanded by motivational speaker J.P. Maroney]? It might be a good idea to separate from a chronically carping spouse, but it is not so easy to abandon the whiny toddler, the colicky infant, or the sullen teenager.

A lot of what we experience as strength comes from knowing what to do with weakness. Nickel and Dimed On (Not) Getting By in America

The label of liberalism is hardly a sentence to public ignominy: otherwise Bruce Springsteen would still be rehabilitating used Cadillacs in Asbury Park and Jane Fonda, for all we know, would be just another overweight housewife.

No one should be incarcerated for debt or squeezed for money they have no chance of getting their hands on.

America is addicted to wars of distraction.

When an American family becomes separated from its toothbrushes and combs and pajamas for a few hours it considers that it has had quite an adventure.

I sleep seven hours. If I go to bed at two, I wake up at nine. If I go to bed at midnight, I wake up at seven. I don’t wake up before – the house can fall apart, but I sleep for seven hours.

Travel with the same woman in a railway car for twelve hours, and you will have written her down in your own mind in quite other language than that of love.

Good women tell all their lives, and by day and by hour and by minute, such things that angels can read.

A feeling of having been injured, on which his mind can brood from hour to hour, allowing him to plead his own cause in his own court, within his own heart, and always to plead it successfully.

I wouldn’t do the ‘Magic Hour’ again, but I would do TV again. The ‘Magic Hour’ is not me.

I asked the waiter, ‘Is this milk fresh?’ He said, ‘Lady, three hours ago it was grass.’

What are the sources of an illumination? To me, they come after hours of searching and keeping my soul ready. Yet they come in a flash, as a religious phenomenon.