Familiarity breeds attempt.

Time wounds all heels.

I went down on the Lower East Side today and saw all those Old Testament houses.

We’re all cremated equal.

We’re insufferable friends.

I’ve been working my head to the bone.

Frankly, I’d like to see the government get ouf of war altogether and leave the whole field to private industry.

For every complex problem, there is a solution that is simple, neat, and wrong.

The real fault is to have faults and not try to mend them.

If you hear that something might be about to happen, call a press conference and demand it!

Say you’re here [at a movie premeire] and you get word that your mother died, you know like hit by a bus or something…You go downstairs; you shed a tear, and say, “It’s a shame…she would have loved this movie.”

The admiration of his peers as a man rather than as a mere politician came easily to Bentsen as it had never come to men like Nixon or Clinton, who had to hold positions of power to gain respect.

All of them bending themselves to listen though, ‘Pray heaven that the inside of my mind not be exposed,’ for each thought, ‘The others are feeling this. They are outraged and indignant with the government about the fishermen. Whereas, I feel nothing at all.’

“But - and again, who am I to judge? - I don’t think that is the only way. I think you can also escape suffering through … love. When you really love someone and they really love you, you have desire, but not in the sense of wanting things that you can’t get or shouldn’t want in the first place. It’s not even that your desire has been satisfied. It’s not satiety. You lie in that person’s arms and you aren’t thinking about what’s next or what’s wrong or what you want.  You aren’t trying to get someplace. Rather than doing or proving or striving for something, you just sort of are, as a lyric poem or work of art is supposed to be, or like a big boulder that’s really just there. And again, it’s not that you’ve gotten what you desire and so are satisfied; it’s that there is no doingness or provingness or strivingness. To my mind, this sounds a little like nirvana and I’d say you are emptied of your self. The difference, maybe, is that in my scheme you aren’t just emptied, you are also filled - but filled with one big thing that replaces all the ten million nettlesome, egotistical things that are inside you as a rule. And with that on thing comes a feeling of joy - not no feeling. You’re like a big boulder that somehow has levitated six feet off the ground. Then there is one more thing, which is wanting to make the person you love happy, to give yourself to him or her, but this wanting is not a feeling external to love or the result of any incompleteness; it is one component of that big single thing. And serving the person you love isn’t something you ‘do.’ It is entirely natural. It’s guided by the same part of your brain, whatever it is, that controls your heartbeat and your - oh - kidney function or whatever.”

Andrew Sullivan is a self-made man who loves his creator.

“Burząc pomniki, oszczędzajcie cokoły. Zawsze mogą się przydać.”

Translated as “When smashing monuments, save the pedestals - they always come in handy.”

In the name of the multitude he was here giving expression to the fact that Western man is in danger of losing his shadow altogether, of identifying himself with his fictive personality and of identifying the world with the abstract picture painted by scientific rationalism. His spiritual and moral opponent, who is just as real as he, no longer dwells in his own breast, but beyond the geographical line of division…Thinking and feeling lose their own inner polarity, and where religious orientation has grown ineffectual, not even a god is at hand to check the sovereign sway of unleashed psychic functions.

[T]he only sin which we never forgive in each other is difference of opinion.

The cook was a good cook, as cooks go; and as cooks go, she went.

The condition of sublime indifference is a logical development of the egocentric life. I lived out the social problem by dying: the real problem is not one of getting on with one’s neighbor or of contributing to the development of one’s country, but of discovering one’s destiny, of making a life in accord with the deep-centered rhythm of the cosmos. To be able to use the word cosmos boldly, to use the world soul, to deal in things “spiritual” - and to shun definitions, alibis, proofs, duties. Paradise is everywhere and every road, if one continues along it far enough, leads to it. One can only go forward by going backward and then sideways and then up and then down. There is no progress: there is perpetual movement, displacement, which is circular, endless. Every man has his own destiny: the only imperative is to follow it, to accept it, no matter where it lead him. [my emphasis]

The fickleness of the women I love is only equalled by the infernal constancy of the women who love me.

The second time my grandmother caught me vomiting, she didn’t wait in the hall; she sat on my bed paging through the copy of The Rise of Silas Lapham that she’d found on my nightstand. Her voice was raspy with morning as she said, “Close the door.” When I had, she said, “That was very foolish of me before, wasn’t it? Thinking you were trying to lose weight.”

I stood by the bureau and said nothing.

“We’ll go to Chicago, and we’ll have it taken case of. Next week, likely. I need to make a few calls. You can do as you see fit, but I’d advise against saying anything to your parents. I just can’t imagine what purpose it would serve.”

I felt an impulse then to express incomprehension, except that I did comprehend. At night, when I listened to “Lonesome Town,” I knew. She was right.

“Isn’t it - ” I hesitated. “Isn’t it illegal?”

“Certainly, and it happens all the time. You can’t legislate human nature.”

“You don’t think that I should have it?”

Quietly, she said, “I think it would kill you. If the circimstances were different, I would say, ‘Go live at a girls’ home in Minnesota, go to California.’ But you don’t have the strength. You’ll be strong again, but you’re not strong now.”

As she spoke, I could feel my lips curling out, the tears welling in my eyes, I whispered, “I’m sorry for disappointing you.”

“Come sit by me,” she said, and when I did, she rubbed my back, the palm of her hand sweeping over the white cotton of my nightgown. After a moment, she said, “We have to make mistakes. It’s how we learn compassion for others.” She paused. “You don’t need to tell me whose it is. That doesn’t matter.”

During the years Dena and Andrew had been together, I’d often marveled at both the swiftness and randomness of their coupling. Ostensibly, he’d had no interest in Dena, and hours later, he’d become hers. It seemed to be a lesson in something, but I wasn’t sure what - an argument for aggression, perhaps, for the bold pursuit of what you wanted? Or proof of most people’s susceptibility to persuasion? Or just confirmation of their essential fickleness? After I’d read Andrew’s note, was I supposed to have immediately marched up to him and staked my claim? Had my faith in our pleasantly murky future been naive, had I been passive or a dupe? These questions were of endless interest to me for several years; I thought of them at night after I’d said my prayers and before I fell asleep. And then, once high school started, I became distracted.

These two are very young: one mustache is still sparse, one face is still blotchy.  Their youth is touching, but I know I can’t be deceived by it.  The young ones are often the most dangerous, the most fanatical, the jumpiest with their guns.  They haven’t yet learned about existence through time.  You have to go slowly with them.

Last week they shot a woman, right about here.  She was a Martha.  She was fumbling in her robe, for her pass, and they thought she was hunting for a bomb.  They thought she was a man in disguise.  There have been such incidents.

What we’re aiming for, says Aunt Lydia, is a spirit of camaraderie among women.  We must all pull together.

Camaraderie, shit, says Moira through the hole in the toilet cubicle.  Right fucking on, Aunt Lydia, as they used to say.  How much do you want to bet she’s got Janine down on her knees?  What you think they get up to in that office of hers?  I bet she’s got her working away on that dried-up old withered–.

Moira! I say.

Moira what?  she whispers.  You know you’ve thought it.

It doesn’t do any good to talk like that, I say, feeling nevertheless the impulse to giggle.  But I still pretended to myself, then that we should try to preserve something resembling dignity.

You were always such a wimp, Moira says, but with affection.  It does so do good.  It does.

And she’s right, I know that now, as I kneel on this undeniably hard floor, listening to the ceremony dron one.  There is something powerful in the whispering of obscenities, about those in power.  There’s something delightful about it, something naughty, secretive, forbidden, thrilling.  It’s like a spell, of sorts.  It deflates them, reduces them to the common denominator where they can be dealt with.  In the paint of the washroom cubicle someone unknown had scratched: Aunt Lydia sucks.  It was like a flag waved from a hilltop in rebellion.  There mere idea of Aunt Lydia doing such a thing was in itself heartening.

So now I imagine, among these Angels and their drained white brides, momentous grunts and sweating, damp furry encounters; or, better, ignominious failures, cocks like three-week-old carrots, anguished fumblings upon flesh cold and unresponding as uncooked fish.

We can feel their eyes on us as we walk in our red dresses two by two across to the side opposite them.  We are being looked at, assessed, whispered about; we can feel it, like tiny ants running on our bare skins.

Sanity is a valuable possession; I hoard it the way people once hoarded money.  I save it, so I will have enough, when the time comes.

Man’s great misfortune is that he has no organ, no kind of eyelid or brake, to mask or block a thought when he wants to.

But who can remember pain, once it’s over?  All that remains of it is a shadow, not in the mind even,  in the flesh.  Pain marks you, but too deep to see.  Out of sight, out of mind.

To be a man, watched by women.  It must be entirely strange.  To have them watching him all the time.  To have them wondering, What’s he going to do next?  To have them flinch when he moves, even if it’s a harmless enough move, to reach for an ashtray perhaps.  To have them sizing him up.  To have them thinking, He can’t do it, he won’t do, he’ll have to do, this last as if he were a garment, out of style or shoddy, which must nevertheless be put on because there’s nothing else available.

To have them putting him on, trying him on, trying him out, while he himself puts them on, like a sock over a foot, onto the stub of himself, his extra, sensitive thumb, his tentacle, his delicate, stalked slug’s eye, which extrudes, expands, winces, and shrivels back into himself when touched wrongly, grows big again, bulging a little at the tip, traveling forward as if along a leaf, into them, avid for vision.  To achieve vision in this way, this journey into a darkness that is composed of women, a woman, who can see in the darkness while he himself strains blindly forward.

She watches him from within.  We’re all watching him.  It’s the one thing we can really do, and it is not for nothing: if he were to falter, fail, or die, what would become of us?  No wonder he’s like a boot, hard on the outside, giving shape to a pulp of a tenderfoot.  That’s just a wish.  I’ve been watching him for some time and he’s given no evidence, of softness.

But watch out, Commander, I tell him in my head.  I’ve got my eye on you.  One false move and I’m dead.

Still, it must be hell, to be a man, like that.
It must be just fine.
It must be hell.
It must be very silent.

Love? said the Commander.

That’s better.  That’s something I know about.  We can talk about that.

Falling in love, I said.  Falling into it, we all did then, one way or another.  How could he have made such light of it?  Sneered even.  As if it was trivial for us, a frill, a whim.  It was, on the contrary, heavy going.  It was the central thing; it was the way you understood yourself; if it never happened to you, not ever, you would be like a mutant, a creature from outer space.  Everyone knew that.

Falling in love, we said; I fell for him.  We were falling women.  We believed in it, this downward motion: so lovely, like flying, and yet at the same time so dire, so extreme, so unlikely.  God is love, they once said, but we reversed that, and love, like heaven, was always just around the corner.  The more difficult it was to love the particular man beside us, the more we believed in Love, abstract and total.  We were waiting, always, for the incarnation.  That word, made flesh.

And sometimes it happened, for a time.  That kind of love comes and goes and is hard to remember afterwards, like pain.  You would look at the man one day and you would think, I loved you, and the tense would be past, and you would be filled with a sense of wonder, because it was such an amazing and precarious and dumb thing to have done; and you would know too why your friends had been evasive about it, at the time.

There is a good deal of comfort, now, in remembering this.

Or sometimes, even when you were still loving, still falling, you’d wake up in the middle of the night, when the moonlight was coming through the window onto his sleeping face, making the shadows in the sockets of his eyes darker and more cavernous than in daytime and you’d think, Who knows what they do, on their own or with other men?  Who knows what they do, on their own or with other men?  Who knows what they say or where they are likely to go?  Who can tell what they really are?  Under their daily-ness.

Likely you would think at those times: What if he doesn’t love me?

Or you’d remember stories you’d read, in the newspapers, about women who had been found–often women but sometimes they would be men, or children, that was the worst–in ditches or forests or refrigerators in abandoned rented rooms, with their clothes on or off, sexually abused or not; at any rate killed.  There were places you didn’t want to walk, precautions you took that had to do with locks on windows and doors, drawing the curtain, leaving on lights.  These things you did were like prayers; you did them and you hoped they would save you.  And for the most part they did.  Or something did; you could tell by the fact that you were still alive.

But all of that was pertinent only in the night, and had nothing to do with the man you loved, at least in daylight.  With that man you wanted it to work, to work out.  Working out was also something you did to keep your body in shape, for the man.  If you worked out enough, maybe the man would too.  Maybe you would be able to work it out together, as if the two of you were a puzzle that could be solved; otherwise, one of you, most likely the man, would go wandering off on a trajectory of his own, taking his addictive body with him and leaving you with a bad withdrawal, which you could counteract by exercise.  If you didn’t work it out it was because one of you had the wrong attitude.  Everything that went on in your life was thought to be due to some positive or negative power emanating from inside your head.

If you don’t like it, change it, we said, to each other and to ourselves.  And so we would change the man, for another one.  Change, we were sure, was for the better always.  We were revisionists; what we revised was ourselves.

It’s strange to remember how we used to think, as if everything were available to us, as if there were no contingencies, no boundaries; as if we were free to shape and reshape forever the ever-expanding perimeters of our lives.  I was like that too, I did that too.  Like was not the first man for me, and he might not have been the last.  If he hadn’t been frozen in that way.  Stopped dead in time, in midair, among the trees back there, in the act of falling.

In former times they would send you a little package, of belongings: what he had with him when he died.  That’s what they would do, in wartime, my mother said.  How long were you supposed to mourn, and what did they say?  Make your life a tribute to the loved one.  And he was, the loved.  One.

Is, I say.  Is, is, only two letters, you stupid shit, can’t you manage to remember it, even a short word like that?

We contain chords someone else must strike.

[Bill Clinton] clutched his throbbing manhood. Monica said, “I can see why they call you a New Democrat. You lean to the right.”

She’d ask Abbot to give her Costello.

ROB REINER: If those were the only people speaking at this convention, I would agree, that would be — but as we say, the Democratic Party has a very large tent. We are the party of inclusion. I mean, when we hold a convention, it’s not like a Utah Jazz basketball game, where there’s a lot of black people on the floor and white people in the stands. We do actually have inclusion. We have a Southern Baptist and a northeastern Jew, and we really are — I mean, I was concerned when I saw them talking about diversity, like the Republicans were talking about the party of diversity and the party of inclusion, I mean, how do they define diversity? Having two guys to head the ticket from two different oil companies? Is that the definition of diversity?

MARY MATALIN: You’ve been practicing your lines, Rob.

Either you’re extremely smart or extremely stupid.

Pam: Sex with you is a Kafka-esque experience.

Alvy Singer: Oh. Thank you.

Pam: I mean that as a compliment.

This here is Bonnie Parker and I’m Clyde Barrow. We…uh…rob banks.

That’s all television is my dear: nothing but auditions.

Daphne: Oh, come on now, Dr. Crane. It’s not like men have never used sex to get what they want.”

Frasier: How can we possibly use sex to get what we want? Sex is what we want.