“More than a food, the pickle was a kind of drug for tenement children, who were still too young for whiskey.”

“Stress level: extreme. It's like she was a jar with the lid screwed on too tight, and inside the jar were pickles, angry pickles, and they were fermenting, and about to explode.”

“More die in the United States of too much food than of too little”

“But those who were young had no thought left for spring and those who still thought were not young any longer.”

“I can remember how when I was young I believed death to be a phenomenon of the body; now I know it to be merely a function of the mind -- and that of the minds who suffer the bereavement. The nihilists say it is the end; the fundamentalists, the beginning; when in reality it is no more than a single tenant or family moving out of a tenement or a town.”

“According to an article in the Washington Post: The Food and Drug Administration has repeatedly urged antidepressant manufacturers not to disclose to physicians and the public that some clinical trials of the medications in children found that drugs were no better than sugar pills, according to documents and testimony released at a congressional hearing yesterday. Regulators supressed the negative information on the grounds that it might scare families and physicians away from the drugs, according to testimony by drug company executives. For at least three medications, they said, the FDA blocked the companies' plans to reveal the negative studies in drug labels.”