"I used to think that kid might become a preacher. Now I don't see how he's going to stay out of prison. Nobody in this family ever went to prison fo… - Garrison Keillor

Did you know that half of all people are below average?

I expected to include plenty of Whitman here and discovered, reading him, a sort of seasickness at all those undulating lines of Uncle Walt’s perpetual swoon over grass and leaves and camerados. There are good poems there, and it’s a mistake to omit them, but Walt is the Typhoid Mary of American Lit: so much bad poetry can be traced back to him (and not brief bad poems, either), he gave so many dreadful writers permission to lavish themselves upon us. Lord, forgive me.

It was luxuries like air conditioning that brought down the Roman Empire. With air conditioning their windows were shut, they couldn't hear the barbarians coming.