The Founding Fathers in their wisdom decided that children were an unnatural strain on parents. So they provided jails called schools, equipped with … - John Updike

In fact we do not try to picture the afterlife, nor is it our selves in our nervous tics and optical flecks that we wish to perpetuate; it is the self as the window on the world that we can't bear to thinkof shutting. My mind when I was a boy of ten or eleven sent up its silent scream at the thought of future aeons — at the thought of the cosmic party going on without me. The yearning for an afterlife is the opposite of selfish: it is love and praise of the world that we are privileged, in this complex interval of light, to witness and experience.

The great thing about the dead, they make space.

America teaches its children that every passion can be transmuted into an occasion to buy.