"A zoo is a good place to make a spectacle of yourself, as the people around you have creepier, more photogenic things to look at."

"You can't brace yourself for famine if you've never known hunger."

"Their house had real hardcover books in it, and you often saw them lying open on the sofa, the words still warm from being read."

"I find it ridiculous to assign a gender to an inanimate object incapable of disrobing and making an occasional fool of itself."

significant

"Whenever I read a passage that moves me, I transcribe it in my diary, hoping my fingers might learn what excellence feels like."

"College is the best thing that can ever happen to you," my father used to say, and he was right, for it was there that I discovered drugs, drinking, and smoking.."

"And when Hugh would grow progressively Gandhi on me, I'd remind him that these were pests---disease carriers who feasted upon the dead and then came indoors to dance upon our silverware."

"Thanks stadium pal!"

"At first, writing for The New Yorker was very scary to me. I couldn't imagine anything that I would write in that typeface."

"Say what you will about the south, but in North Carolina a hot dog is free to swing anyway it wishes."

"There is still the outside world to contend with. A world of backfiring cars, and their human equivalents."

"In other parts of the country people tried to stay together for the sake of the children. In New York they tried to work things out for the sake of the apartment."

"People are often frightened of Parisians, but an American in Paris will find no harsher critic than another American."

"I needed to temper (my dad's) enthusiasm a bit (about attending Princeton), and so I announced that I would be majoring in patricide...My mom was actually jealous."

"I was just struggling with my inner vachette and pondering the depths of my own inhumanity."

"But I have no mind for business and considered staying awake to be enough of an accomplishment."

"Given enough time, I guess anything can look good. All it has to do is survive."

"This was the consequence of seeing too much and understanding the horrible truth: No one is safe. The world is not manageable."

"I'd always thought that I understood this, but lately I realize that what I call "understanding" is basically just fantasizing."

"I was a smart-ass, born and raised. This had been my curse and would continue to be so."

"She took pictures of germs, viruses, and people reacting to germs and viruses. On weekends, for extra money, she photographed weddings, which really wasn't that much of a stretch"

"Remember that the most important thing is to try and love other people as much as they love you."

"There seemed to be some correlation between devotion to God and a misguided zeal for marshmallows."

"There's a reason regular people don't appear on TV: we're boring."

"What I really hated, of course, was my mind. There must have been an off switch somewhere, but I was damned if I could find it."

"I can't promise I'll never kill anyone again," he once said, strapping a refrigerator to his back. "It's unrealistic to live your life within such strict parameters"

"Clatter of a typewriter suggests that you're actually building something."

"It make one's mouth hurt to speak with such forced merriment."

"In Japanese and Italian, the response to ["How are you?"] is "I'm fine, and you?" In German it's answered with a sigh and a slight pause, followed by "Not so good."

"Well, that's a hell of a reason to poison yourself."

"I've always had a way with the little people, making it a point to humor them without looking down my nose at their wasted empty lives."

"Nobody pours stuffing like you do, my friend."

"I can't seem to fathom that the things important to me are not important to other people as well, and so I come off sounding like a missionary, someone whose job it is to convert rather than listen."

"Watch, hell,' Walt said. 'This is strip poker. What kind of homo wants to sit around and watch four guys get naked?"

"But all of a sudden they’re poets, right, like that’s all it takes — being in love."

"As bad a dresser as I am, anything beats being judged by my character."

"I giggled out loud at his stupidity. If anyone knew how to make a bed, it was a faggot."

"I didn't know about the rest of the class, but when Bastille Day eventually rolled around, I planned to stay home and clean my oven."

"My first semester I had only nine students. Hoping they might view me as professional and well prepared, I arrived bearing name tags fashioned in the shape of maple leaves."

"Snowball "just "leads elves on, elves and Santas. He is playing a dangerous game."

"I had to wrestle daily with both my inadequacy and my uncontrollable jealousy. I didn't want to kill her, but hoped someone else might do the job for me."

"The Greeks had invented democracy, built the Acropolis and called it a day."

"The message was that if something is free, you should only take the best. If, on the other hand, you're forced to pay, it's best to lower the bar and not be so choosy."

"They were Jesuits," she told me. "That means they believe in God but not in terlet paper. You should have seen their underwear. Disgusting."

"If a person who constantly reads is labeled a bookworm, then I was quickly becoming what might be called a tapeworm."

"My feet are completely flat, but for most of my life they were still shaped like feet. Now, thanks to bunions, they're shaped more like states, wide boring ones that nobody wants to drive through."

"The landscape is best described as 'pedestrian hostile.' It's pointless to try to take a walk, so I generally just stay in the room and think about shooting myself in the head."

"We give anonymously because the sackfuls of thank-you letters break our hearts with their clumsy handwriting and hopeless phonetic spelling."

"If you stepped out of the shower and saw a leprechaun standing at the base of your toilet, would you scream, or would you innately understand that he meant you no harm?"