People From Baltimore

"Life is a mixed blessing, which we vainly try to unmix."

"Life's most painful condition: to be almost a celebrity."

"Young lovers and young nations face the same problem: after orgasm, what?"

"Mumps, measles, and puppy love are terrible after twenty."

"We wake in the night, to stereophonic silence."

"My doctor is nice; every time I see him, I’m ashamed of what I think of doctors in general."

"There’s an awful lot of blood around that water is thicker than."

"If you must reread old love letters, better pick a room without mirrors."

"Insult, not flattery, is the great aphrodisiac."

"Most of us would rather risk catastrophe than read the directions."

"Good food, good sex, good digestion, good sleep: to these basic animal pleasures, man has added nothing but the good cigarette."

"Family quarrels have a total bitterness unmatched by others. Yet it sometimes happens that they also have a kind of tang, a pleasantness beneath the unpleasantness, based on the tacit understanding that this is not for keeps; that any limb you climb out on will still be there later for you to climb back."

"I do not trust those who are above name-dropping. The suppression of small vices always exacts too high a toll."

"I have seen messed-up people of forty who still seemed salvageable, and children of six or seven who almost surely were not."

"You never realize how tacky your furniture is till you try to give it to the Salvation Army and they won't take it."

"There are now electrical appliances with the main unit so sealed in that it cannot be got at for repair. There have always been human beings like that."

"What a shame that allowances have to stop with the teens: both those that are paid to us and those that are made for us."

"The woman just ahead of you at the supermarket checkout has all the delectable groceries you didn't even know they carried."

"Being Irish is, no matter how real, a pose."

"A car is useless in New York, essential everywhere else. The same with good manners."

"Whether or not you love television, you've got to admit that it certainly loves itself."

"If an article is attractive, or useful, or inexpensive, they'll stop making it tomorrow; if it's all three, they stopped making it yesterday."

"I'm glad I don't have to explain to a man from Mars why each day I set fire to dozens of little pieces of paper, and then put them in my mouth."

"It took man thousands of years to put words down on paper, and his lawyers still wish he wouldn't."

"People who won't have a TV set in their house get more pleasure from their refusal than most of us get from TV."

"Tough and funny and a little bit kind: that is as near to perfection as a human being can be."

"Love one another and you will be happy. It’s as simple and difficult as that."

"No one has ever loved anyone the way everyone wants to be loved."

"Hate leaves ugly scars, love leaves beautiful ones."

"In the arithmetic of love, one plus one equals everything, and two minus one equals nothing."

"No one can understand love who has not experienced infatuation. And no one can understand infatuation, no matter how many times he has experienced it."

"When we first fall in love, we feel that we know all there is to know about life, and perhaps we are right."

"Love is the silent saying and saying of a single name."

"The hardest-learned lesson: that people have only their kind of love to give, not our kind."

"It is a feeling at once stimulating and flat, to know that someone you do not love is in love with you."

"When we have been humiliated by someone we love, it takes all our strength to pretend to recover from it."

"When a man comes to love a woman exactly as she had dreamed, she decides he is a weakling."

"The excesses of love soon pass, but its insufficiencies torment us forever."

"We lavish on animals the love we are afraid to show to people. People might not return it; or worse, they might."

"I am as I am" is another way of saying "I can do without your love."

"Love is often gentle, desire always a rage."

"What we love about love is the fever, which marriage puts to bed and cures."

"If the second marriage really succeeds, the first one didn't really fail."

"A successful marriage requires falling in love many times, always with the same person."

"The marriage of convenience has this to recommend it: we are better judges of convenience than we are of love."

"After the chills and fever of love, how nice is the 98.6 degrees of marriage!"

"If you made a list of the reasons why any couple got married, and another list of the reasons for their divorce, you'd have a hell of a lot of overlapping."

"How can a man marry wisely in his twenties? The girl he's going to wind up wanting hasn't even been born."

"A husband only worries about a particular Other Man; a wife distrusts her whole species."

"When a woman reaches forty, she must wait twenty years for her husband to catch up."