“Taking in money, banks were like industrial vacuum cleaners. Giving it out, they were clogged faucets”

“I'm sure, you'll never again have a problem with a tool or a machine. No more hammered thumbs, no vacuum-cleaner catastrophes." "That'll take a second miracle." "Because all that clumsiness was never anything but an elaborate excuse not to have a gun, not to learn how to use one.”

“Hope wasn't a cottage industry; it was neither a product that she could manufacture like needlepoint samplers nor a substance she could secrete, in her cautious solitude, like a maple tree producing the essence of syrup. Hope was to be found in other people, by reaching out, by taking risks, by opening her fortress heart.”

“...it will be a world made not bright but brighter, not clean but cleaner.”

“Some argued that the youth of today were poorly educated and insufficiently industrious, but one of them had sought to validate his generation by spending considerable time and effort chiseling an obscene word in the concrete picnic table, and he had spelled it correctly.”

“A swelled head is just a result of nature's frenzied efforts to fill a vacuum.”

“Dogs know we need to give affection as much as they need to receive it. They were the first therapists; they've been in practice for thousands of years.”