“Odd how being away could teach you about home.”

“His beard might once have reached to his waist, but his waist had grown off and left his beard high and dry.”

“A cigarette is like a hamster, harmless until you stick it in your mouth and light it on fire.”

“At the college where I teach, I'm surrounded by circus people. We aren't tightrope walkers or acrobats. We don't breathe fire or swallow swords. We're gypsies, moving wherever there's work to be found. Our scrapbooks and photo albums bear witness to our vagabond lives: college years, grad-school years, instructor-mill years, first-job years. In between each stage is a picture of old friends helping to fill a truck with boxes and furniture. We pitch our tents, and that place becomes home for a while. We make families from colleagues and students, lovers and neighbors. And when that place is no longer working, we don't just make do. We move on to the place that's next. No place is home. Every place is home. Home is our stuff. As much as I love the Cumberland Valley at twilight, I probably won't live there forever, and this doesn't really scare me. That's how I know I'm circus people. ”

“To cheapen the lives of any group of men, cheapens the lives of all men, even our own. This is a law of human psychology, or human nature. And it will not be repealed by our wishes, nor will it be merciful to our blindness.”

“It is not the ought-ness of the problem that we have to consider, but the is-ness!”

“I grew up accepting the inevitability that once you became a woman, you were always on a diet. Being a woman equaled loss.”