“As I have discovered by examining my past, I started out as a child. Coincidentally, so did my brother. My mother did not put all her eggs in one basket, so to speak: she gave me a younger brother named Russell, who taught me what was meant by "survival of the fittest.”

“The essence of childhood, of course, is play, which my friends and I did endlessly on streets that we reluctantly shared with traffic.”

“Always end the name of your child with a vowel, so that when you yell the name will carry.”

“And of course, when you see your brother in the toilet bowl...there's a little voice that say, 'I wonder where he would go...'...if it hadn't been for his head...”

“Suddenly, this romantic agony was enriched by a less romantic one: I had to go to the bathroom. Needless to say, I couldn't let her know about this urge, for great lovers never did such things. The answer to "Romeo Romeo, wherefore art thou, Romeo?" was not "In the men's room, Julie.”

“I’m supposed to figure out if the glass is half full or half empty,” I told her.Without a moment’s hesitation, in a split second, my grandmother shrugged and said: “It depends on if you’re drinking or pouring.”

“The past is a ghost, the future a dream and all we ever have is now.”