I did know Ted Hughes and I partly wrote the book to explain to myself and others the complexities of a marriage that was for six years wonderfully productive of poetry and then ended in tragedy.

My father, who was from a wealthy family and highly educated, a lawyer, Yale and Columbia, walked out with the benefit of a healthy push from my mother, a seventh grade graduate, who took a typing course and got a secretarial job as fast as she could.

George Weinberg

Okay. You are somewhere, at least in theory, between Butte and Mobile, going faster than sound in a long metal container that is not in physical contact with anything. A slight jiggling sensation at your prostate (if you have one) is, essentially, all that is holding you up 30,000 feet above something that looks like a badly distressed suede jacket, but is in fact the surface of the earth. You have been served a brown puddle with a lump in it, a rectangle of pale-yellow congealment, and some kind of mineral-based salad. There is a wheeeeengneeeenngn noise. The jiggle-at-the-prostate feeling gives way to a kind of giving-way sensation. You are swallowed by a cloud. Rule one: Maintain perspective.

Roy Blount, Jr.

It is a pure soul who can hold true the in­no­cence and time­less­ness of pas­sion in an­oth­er soul. Each un­veil­ing the great­est pieces of the oth­er, locked to­geth­er at the heart for eter­ni­ty

Christine Zolendz

Bad taste is a species of bad morals.

Christian Nevell Bovee

Laughter kills fear, and without fear there can be no faith. For without fear of the devil there is no need for God.

Sean Connery

He that waits upon a fortune, is never sure of a dinner.

Benjamin Franklin

Trust, but verify.

Ronald Reagan

If a man has common sense, he has all the sense there is.

Sam Rayburn

The hypothesis of surviving intelligence and personality - not only surviving but anxious and able with difficulty to communicate - is the simplest and most straightforward and the only one that fits all the facts.

Oliver Joseph Lodge

Many of the phenomena of Winter are suggestive of an inexpressible tenderness and fragile delicacy. We are accustomed to hear this king described as a rude and boisterous tyrant; but with the gentleness of a lover he adorns the tresses of Summer.

Henry David Thoreau

Truth is great and will prevail if left to herself, that she is the proper and sufficient antagonist to error, and has nothing to fear from the conflict, unless by human interposition disarmed of her natural weapons, free argument and debate, errors

Thomas Jefferson

Nothing that was worthy in the past departs no truth or goodness realized by man ever dies, or can die.

Thomas Carlyle