It is always self-defeating to pretend to the style of a generation younger than your own; it simply erases your own experience in history.

Fear . . . is forward. No one is afraid of yesterday.

At six one morning, Will went out in jeans and frayed sweater to buy a quart of milk. A tourist bus went by. The megaphone was directed at him. "There's one," it said. That was in the l960s. Ever since, he's wondered. There's one what?

Nothing defines the quality of life in a community more clearly than people who regard themselves, or whom the consensus chooses to regard, as mentally unwell.

In the strange heat all litigation brings to bear on things, the very process of litigation fosters the most profound misunderstandings in the world.