I moved to New England partly because it has a real literary past. The ghosts of Hawthorne and Melville still sit on those green hills. The worship of Mammon is also somewhat lessened there by the spirit of irony. I don't get hay fever in New England either.

We take our bearings, daily, from others. To be sane is, to a great extent, to be sociable.

Being naked approaches being revolutionary; going barefoot is mere populism.

* That a marriage ends is less than ideal; but all things end under heaven, and if temporality is held to be invalidating, then nothing real succeeds.