“Life starts out with everyone clapping when you take a poo and goes downhill from there. ”

“I was stunned. I pulled the phone away and looked quizzically at the hole-punched speaker. Aside from the blood obligation to be my sister's maid of honor, it had never occured to me that I would g...”

“The only bit I have pictured in any detail is the music (maybe 'The Book of Love' by the Magnetic Fields. Or Johnny Cash's 'It Ain't Me, Babe'). It doesn't matter if the selection is slow or fast, ...”

“I got out on the street and started crying the kind of hysterical tears made justifiable only by turning off ones cell phone, putting it to the ear, and pretending to be told of a death in the family.”

“Its remarkable the logic we build around a misapprehension.”

“I never asked my mother where babies came from but I remember clearly the day she volunteered the information....my mother called me to set the table for dinner. She sat me down in the kitchen, and...”

“Power is not revealed by striking hard or often, but by striking true.”

“As time and space are bent by gravity, so too is truth bent by power.”

“What a curious power words have.”

“If you stand in a wheat field at this time of year, a few weeks from harvest, it's not hard to imagine you're looking at something out of mythology: all this golden sunlight brought down to earth, ...”

“You have come nearer to mastering a good many aspects of cooking than anyone except a handful of great chefs, and some day it will pay off. I know it will. You will just have to go on working, and ...”

“I turned from my window. Suddenly it seemed odd for my neighbors on both sides to have visitors while I had none. For the first time, I felt lonely at 'Sconset."Let's cook," Frannie said energetica...”

“They had killed themselves over our dying forests, over manatees maimed by propellers as they surfaced to drink from garden hoses; they had killed themselves at the sight of used tires stacked high...”

“The world seemed to shimmer a little at the edges.”

“If we cannot accept the importance of the world, which considers itself important, if in the midst of that world our laughter finds no echo, we have but one choice: to take the world as a whole and...”