“At every Christmas, I fail to remember the daughters' shoe sizes, and they are not growing, but grown. After ostensible hard thought about who needs what, I have failed to give good gifts; I have failed to receive good gifts.”

“At every Christmas, I fail to remember the daughters' shoe sizes, and they are not growing, but grown. After ostensible hard thought about who needs what, I have failed to give good gifts; I have failed to receive good gifts.”

“Christmas is the season I use to clock failure in life. It stops time, as it were, on the year - where you are in it, where you are in your travail unto the grave.”

“disputing nothing is the first step through the difficult door of happiness”

“Isn't it true that there is a rare kind of person who perceives, as does a good dog, that life is doing something meaningful, and who discovers what it is and goes about doing it with a spirit of moderate hustle, and there is a not rare kind of person who perceives none of this and who goes about doing what is necessary in a spirit of aggrievedness?”

“Now she understood a few things: that the American academy, which one might have thought the place to defend freedom of speech, had been the seat and soul of abrogating freedom of speech, if the first assault on its freedom can be said to be restricting, or handcuffing speech. The day she heard “redneck” on NPR, she turned NPR off, not because broadcasters were still using the term, but because she knew one day they would not be. In fact, she had a vision of the quiet moment backstage at a Boston studio when a good, surprised correspondent was let go for saying “redneck” the last time it would be said.”