There is no pleasing New Englanders, my dear, their soil is all rocks and their hearts are bloodless absolutes. - John Updike

Writers may be disreputable, incorrigible, early to decay or late to bloom but they dare to go it alone

The world keeps ending but new people too dumb to know it keep showing up as if the fun's just started.

Now nuns have blended into everybody else or else faded away. Vocations drying up, nobody wants to be selfless any more, everybody wants their fun. No more nuns, no more rabbis. No more good people, waiting to have their fun in the afterlife. The thing about the afterlife, it kept this life within bounds somehow, like the Russians. Now there's just Japan, and technology, and the profit motive, and getting all you can while you can.