“Every hour of television that a person watches after the age of twenty-five, the researchers concluded, potentially snips twenty-two minutes off of the viewer's life span.”

“There was no girls' cross-country team at our high school, since cross-country courses were two or three miles long, and, at that distance, a girl's uterus could fall out.”

“Drop onto all fours and crawl the length of the court or field, as if you were climbing a wall. This prepares you, too, for light cat burgling, should your athletic career flag.”

“According to current research, in the determination of a person's level of happiness, genetics accounts for about 50 percent; life circumstances, such as age, gender, ethnicity, marital status, income, health, occupation, and religious affiliation, account for about 10 to 20 percent; and the remainder is a product of how a person thinks and acts.”

“I’m on a government watch list. But I’m not interested, because government watches only work twenty minutes out of every hour.”

“Happiness," wrote Yeats, "is neither virtue nor pleasure nor this thing nor that, but simply growth. We are happy when we are growing." Contemporary researchers make the same argument: that it isn't goal attainment but the process of striving after goals-that is, growth-that brings happiness.”

“Another study suggested that getting one extra hour of sleep each night would do more for a person's happiness than getting a $60,000 raise.”