Eagles are seagulls with a good hairdo.

Making eye contact with adults while dressed as a clown is risky.

There's much to be said for feeling numb. Time passes more quickly. You eat less, and because numbness encourages laziness, you do fewer things, good or bad, and the world's probably a better place for it.

You can't get mad at weather because weather's not about you. Apply that lesson to most other aspects of life.

If you have an impulse to kindness, act on it.

Birds are a miracle because they prove to us there is a finer, simpler state of being which we may strive to attain.

You can't fake creativity, competence, or sexual arousal.

Every single moment is a coincidence.

Cloning is great. If God made the original, then making copies should be fine.

Blame is just a lazy person's way of making sense of chaos.

A ring is a halo on your finger.

Nothing very very good and nothing very very bad ever lasts for very very long.

If human beings had genuine courage, they'd wear their costumes every day of the year, not just on Halloween.

Too much free time is certainly a monkey's paw in disguise. Most people can't handle a structureless life.

Long lives aren't natural. We forget that senior citizens are as much an invention as toasters or penicillin.

One of the cruelest things you can do to another person is pretend you care about them more than you really do.

People are pretty forgiving when it comes to other people's families. The only family that ever horrifies you is your own.

The time you feel lonely is the time you most need to be by yourself.

What makes 'American Pie' so unusual is that it isn't a relic from the counterculture but a talisman, which, like a sacred river, keeps bringing joy to listeners everywhere. When 'American Pie' suddenly is played on a jukebox or radio, it's almost impossible not to sing along.

Influenced by Pete Seeger and the Weavers, McLean proudly wore the mantle of troubadour in the early 1970s, when 'American Pie' topped the Billboard charts, and has never shed the cape.

There is no real way to categorize McLean's 'American Pie' for its hybrid of modern poetry and folk ballad, beer-hall chant and high-art rock.

Stubbornness is a positive quality of presidential leadership - if you're right about what you're stubborn about.

With the newspapers cheering, Lieutenant Colonel Roosevelt chose a top-notch regiment of more than 1,250 men. They were first called Teddy's Texas Tarantulas and went through three or four other monikers until Roosevelt's Rough Riders stuck.

Theodore Roosevelt had been enthralled with the idea of Texas since 1883, when he arrived in the Dakota Territory to ranch cattle.