It is the immigrant hordes who keep this country alive, the waves of them arriving year after year.... Who believes in America more than the people who run down the gangplank and kiss the ground?

There was that feeling one gets in a ride to a cemetery trailing a body in a coffin -- an impatience with the dead, a longing to be back home where one could get on with the illusion that not death but daily life is the permanent condition.

Your enemy brought out your dormant primal instincts, he lit up the primitive circuits of your brain.

Someone dying asks if there is life after death. Yes, comes the answer, only not yours.

Time seems to me a drift, a shifting of sand. And my mind is shifting with it. I am wearing away.

Satire's nature is to be one-sided, contemptuous of ambiguity, and so unfairly selective as to find in the purity of ridicule an inarguable moral truth.

E. L. DOCTOROW, Creationists: Selected Essays

My memories pale as I prevail upon them again and again. They become more and more ghostly. I fear nothing so much as losing them altogether and having only my blank endless mind to live in.