“We’d been apart so long-I’d been dead so long, she said in English. I thought surely you’d built a new life, with no room in it for me. I’d hoped that.”

All this happened, more or less.

There is no beginning, no middle, no end, no suspense, no moral, no causes, no effects. What we love in our books are the depths of many marvelous moments seen all at one time.

The only difference between Hitler and Bush is that Hitler was elected.

I tell you, we are here on Earth to fart around, and don’t let anybody tell you different.

Dear future generations: Please accept our apologies. We were rolling drunk on petroleum.

Love is where you find it. I think it is foolish to go around looking for it, and I think it can be poisonous. I wish that people who are conventionally supposed to love each other would say to each other, when they fight, ‘Please — a little less love, and a little more common decency’.

And yet another moral occurs to me now: Make love when you can. It’s good for you.

My life is nothing but room for you. I said. It could never be filled by anyone but you.

And Lot’s wife, of course, was told not to look back where all those people and their homes had been. But she did look back, and I love her for that, because it was so human. So she was turned into a pillar of salt. So it goes.

She hated people who thought too much. At that moment, she struck me as an appropriate representative for almost all mankind.

The nicest veterans, the kindest and funniest ones, the ones who hated war the most, were the ones who’d really fought.

Being a Humanist means trying to behave decently without expectation of rewards or punishment after you are dead.

The last thing I ever wanted was to be alive when the three most powerful people on the whole planet would be named Bush, Dick and Colon.

Everything was beautiful and nothing hurt.

All time is all time. It does not change. It does not lend itself to warnings or explanations. It simply is. Take it moment by moment, and you will find that we are all, as I’ve said before, bugs in amber.

Maturity, is knowing what your limitations are, Maturity is a bitter disappointment for which no remedy exists, unless laughter can be said to remedy anything.

Death meant little to me. It was the last joke in a series of bad jokes.

Death, therefore, the most awful of evils, is nothing to us, seeing that, when we are, death is not come, and, when death is come, we are not.

We are here to laugh at the odds and live our lives so well that Death will tremble to take us.

Even for those to whom life and death are equal jests. There are some things that are still held in respect.

If there be light, then there is darkness; if cold, heat; if height, depth; if solid, fluid; if hard, soft; if rough, smooth; if calm, tempest; if prosperity, adversity; if life, death.

Once more I am the silent one who came out of the distance wrapped in cold rain and bells: I owe to earth’s pure death the will to sprout.

People who are well represented at trial do not get the death penalty.

Death is always sad, I suppose, to us who look forward to it: I expect it will seem very different when we can look back upon it.