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

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.

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.

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

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.

There was a considerable difference between the ages of my parents, but this circumstance seemed to unite them only closer in bonds of devoted affection.

Needing kindness myself, I am kinder now, and we get on amazingly well. [p. 110]

In doing nothing men learn to do evil.

I think God has a plan for all of us, and even if that plan includes Hell, its still a plan.

The Rosary is the book of the blind.

Oh, well, if you want original conversations, you'd better go and talk to yourself.

Do work you love, in which you can excel: The smaller the gap between who you are in your personal life and who you are at work, the happier you will be.

Everybody knows what a caterpillar is, and it doesn't look anything like a butterfly.

The lack of affordable, quality child care is a ticking time bomb.

The world for which you have been so carefully prepared is being taken away from you, by the grace of God.