I shouted the perfect words to scare him off. It was just the delivery (and only the delivery) that made me sound like a twelve-year-old girl with pee running down her leg. I felt dirty and stupid.

Mathematicians finally developed a financial model to accurately compare apples and oranges. Any two kinds of fruit can be compared, although guavas still cause minor rounding errors.

The stalker, meanwhile, stepped into the road. Didn’t even check for traffic. There wasn’t any, but something told me this was lucky for traffic rather than the stalker.

Instead of heading for a big mental breakdown, I decided to have a small breakdown every Tuesday evening.

What? Quinn's one of them? I just thought he was an a*shole!

Mankind is not likely to salvage civilization unless he can evolve a system of good and evil which is independent of heaven and hell.

Among the heaps of brick and plaster lies/ a girder, still itself among the rubbish

Do we really require so many gardening programmes, makeover programmes or celebrity chefs?

Viola [Davis] is one of the great actors of her generation. She has one of these moments in the theater that I don't even know how to describe.

Love of privacy - perhaps because of the increasing exactions of society - has become in many people almost pathological.

I have always followed the most passionate course.

The very act of questioning whether you exist proves you do, because you must be there for the doubt to be entertained in the first place.

State formation has been a brutal project, with many hideous consequences. But the results exist, and their pernicious aspects should be overcome.

It is sometimes necessary to repeat what all know. All mapmakers should place the Mississippi in the same location and avoid originality.