“Not returning phone calls is the severest form of torture in the civilized world.”

“The late great Horace Lloyd Swithin (1844-1917), British essayist, lecturer, satirist, and social observer, wrote in his autobiographical Appointments, 1890-1901 (1902), "When one travels abroad, one doesn't so much discover the hidden Wonders of the World, but the hidden wonders of the individuals with whom one is traveling. They may turn out to afford a stirring view, a rather dull landscape, or a terrain so treacherous one finds it's best to forget the entire affair and return home.”

“No wonder so many adults long to return to university, to all those deadlines--ahhh, that structure! Scaffolding to which we may cling! Even if it is arbitrary, without it, we're lost, wholly incapable of separating the Romantic from the Victorian in our sad, bewildering lives...”

“Dad said certain people's sanity, in order to maintain a healthy equilibrium, required getting messy once in a while, what he called "going Chekhovian:" some people, every now and then, simply had to have One Too Many, go drifty voiced and slouch mouthed, swimming willfully around in their own sadness as if it were hot springs.”

“Smoke was a person with a sense of history. Do you know what I mean?" ...in truth, I DID know what she meant. Da Vinci, Martin Luther King, Jr., Genghis Kahn, Abraham Lincoln, Bette Davis - if you read their definitive biographies, you learned even when they were a month old, cooing in some wobbly crib in the middle of nowhere, they already had something historic about them. The way other kids had baseball, long division, Hot Wheels, and hula hoops, these kids had History and thus tended to be prone to colds, unpopular, sometimes plagued with a physical deformity (Lord Byron's clubfoot, Maugham's severe stutter, for example), which pushed them into exile in their heads. It was there they began to dream of human anatomy, civil rights, conquering Asia, a lost speech and being (within a span of four years) a jezebel, a marked woman, a little fox and an old maid.”

“Well, life isn't a cakewalk, is it?! Eighty-nine percent of the world's most valuable art was created by men living in rat-infested flats. You think Velásquez wore Adidas? You think he enjoyed the luxuries of central heating and twenty-four-hour pizza delivery?!”

“For the record, there were no framed pictures of me around our house, and the only class portrait Dad had ever ordered was the one from Sparta Elementary in which I'd sat, knees glued together, in front of a background that looked like Yosemite, sporting pink overalls and a lazy eye. "This is classic," Dad said. "That they shamelessly send me an order form so I can pay $69.95 for prints large and small of a photo in which my daughter looks as if she just suffered a great blow to her head - it just shows you, we are simply strapped to a motorized assembly line moving through this country. We're supposed to pay out, shut up or get tossed in the rejects bin.”