“One has not lived until one has carried a sixty-pound dog down a sweeping flight of stairs at half-past V in the morning.”

“Should I go up one flight of stairs and then come back down, or should I go down one flight of stairs and then come back up? Same destination, same distance, same amount of work, but two different paths. Who knows, I might find love on one path. Probably the path I don’t choose. 
”

“In the past few years, I have made a thrilling discovery ... that until one is over sixty, one can never really learn the secret of living. One can then begin to live, not simply with the intense part of oneself, but with one's entire being.”

“The average TV commercial of sixty seconds has one hundred and twenty half-second clips in it, or one-third of a second. We bombard people with sensation. That substitutes for thinking.”

“How come she has more crap here now than when she lived with me?” their father grumbled as he came down one morning.”

“Sixty-four has a way of forgetting what twenty-one was like.”