“The human organism is built for tension and relaxation, work and sleep. The principle of life is rhythm.”

“It is astounding to me, and achingly sad, that with eighty thousand people on the waiting list for donated hearts and livers and kidneys, with sixteen a day dying there on that list, that more then...”

“As when astronaut Mike Mulhane was asked by a NASA psychiatrist what epitaph he'd like to have on his gravestone, Mulhane answered, "A loving husband and devoted father," though in reality, he joke...”

“People are messy, unpredictable things.”

“We are biology. We are reminded of this at the beginning and the end, at birth and at death. In between we do what we can to forget.”

“Many people will find this book disrespectful. There is nothing amusing about being dead, they will say. Ah, but there is.”

“A lady's imagination is very rapid; it jumps from admiration to love, from love to matrimony in a moment.”

“I've always said that idleness dulls the spirit. We have to keep the brain busy, or at least the hands if we don't have a brain.”

“If your workplace was somehow transplanted into the jungle and everyone was forced to survive at a very primitive level, it's safe to say that eventually your boss would rape you.”

“Sex can be used either for self-affirmation or for self-transcendence either to intensify the ego and consolidate the social persona by some kind of conspicuous embarkation and heroic conquest, or...”

“He didn't know all that much about how the machinery worked anyway. Such knowledge was for specialists. In war, as in love, he was a fearless, happy-go-lucky adventurer.”

“If she did experience sex--or something close to it--in high school, I'm sure it would have been less out of sexual desire or love than literary curiosity.”