I'd rather rot on my own floor than be found by a bunch of bingo players in a nursing home.
Whenever people are confronted by a prediction for the future that they simply cannot or will not believe, they always say, 'It will never happen in my lifetime.' If the prediction is something they deplore and fear, they say it with calculated bravado, often adding a smug, snorty hhrrummph.
American couples have gone to such lengths to avoid the interference of in-laws that they have to pay marriage counselors to interfere between them.
True nostalgia is an ephemeral composition of disjointed memories.
Optimists don't mind if you eavesdrop on them. They welcome it, in fact, because it helps them spread their fiendish gospel.
Until feminists started wailing about the female's passivity, submissiveness, and something called 'victim status,' I had no idea women were such doormats. My childhood was populated by Eleanor Roosevelt, Amelia Earhart, Pearl Buck, Marie Curie, Clare Boothe Luce, and the Duchess of Windsor.
Americans worship creativity the way they worship physical beauty - as a way of enjoying elitism without guilt: God did it.
To me, the thing that has always ruined Jane Fonda is her voice.
To achieve the very pinnacle of good taste, the neoclassicists wrote their plays entirely in alexandrine verse, a rarefied meter that is uniquely tailored to the French language and fits no other.
Feminists, I hasten to add, are not all bad. In fact, they are an ideal bellwether, an invaluable aid in helping me form opinions on issues that I don't have time to keep up with. If the feminists are for it, I'm against it; if the feminists are against it, I'm for it.
People are so busy dreaming the American Dream, fantasizing about what they could be or have a right to be, that they're all asleep at the switch. Consequently we are living in the Age of Human Error.
Any woman who has ever worked in a gutsy male environment knows that the correct response to a randy remark is an even more salacious retort. But timid feminists don't see it that way. To them, the proper reply is a lawsuit - that safe, modern version of the old slap in the face.
We are incapable of leaving anything to the imagination and loath to leave anything out. Maniacal thoroughness has become our national verbal ideal.
I've done pretty well as a professional fed-up. The tools of my trade so far have been irony, tongue-in-cheek mockery, and supercilious contempt, but these are highly civilized weapons designed for 18th-century French salons.
Writers, not psychiatrists, are the true interpreters of the human mind and heart, and we have been at it for a very long time.
If last words are to be audible and coherent, they need to be delivered before you have any tubes up your nose or down your throat. Otherwise, the nurse gets the last word when she says, 'Don't try to talk, honey.'
Showing up at school already able to read is like showing up at the undertaker's already embalmed: people start worrying about being put out of their jobs.
If the West Point class of 1915 is called 'the class the stars fell on' for the number of World War II generals it produced, my junior-high class of 1950 is the class a ton of bricks fell on from Hollywood's gut-wrenching portrayals of mother-love in '40s-era movies.
The long march of Western civilization from pantheons of gods for every taste to one God for all has been thrown into reverse by celebrity worship to give us a plethora of ancient deities to follow.
Aging does not make women powerless objects of pity but colorful and entertaining individuals and, on occasion, fire-breathing dragons that wise people don't cross.
