Here is what happens in middle age: Some friends and acquaintances who were merely eccentric for years become unmistakably mad.

A few nights later, I secretly hope that I might be a genius. Why else can no amount of sleeping pills fell my brain? But in the morning my daughter asks me what a cloud is and I cannot say.

A thought experiment courtesy of the Stoics. If you are tired of everything you possess, imagine that you have lost all these things.

The wife watched her neighbor get fat over the next year. The Germans have a word for that. Kummerspeck. Literally, grief bacon.

Is she a good baby? People would ask me. Well, no, I'd say.That swirl of hair on the back of her head. We must have taken a thousand pictures of it.

Once when he was still young, I saw a bit of his scalp showing through his hair and I was afraid. But it was just a cowlick. Now sometimes it shows through for real, but I feel only tenderness.

Whenever the wife wants to do drugs, she thinks about Sartre. One bad trip and then a giant lobster followed him around for the rest of his days.

What Ann Druyan said: Compressed into a minute-long segment, the brain waves of a woman newly in love sound like a string of firecrackers exploding.

Does rejection ever get any easier? Only if we decide not to invest emotion in the dismissal…

You can never escape God's Grace because as you run from it, you run to it.

Photography is my other kind of music.

My husband will never chase another woman. He's too fine too decent too old.

Nothing so perilous as procrastination

It's very clear that Vladimir Putin has decided that he will eliminate his opponents and anyone who stands up for democracy and freedom. And he does so with relative impunity.

But in every matter the consensus of opinion among all nations is to be regarded as the law of nature.

Harold could no longer pass a stranger without acknowledging the truth that everyone was the same, and also unique; and that this was the dilemma of being human.

I think it's wrong that so many people pass on from this existence, and take all their knowledge with them.

Green Day is politically brain-dead but I love the little monkeys.