But I show up most places with a book

Me too. Anywhere I might have to wait in line, and especially to parties. Of course, you and everyone else still read faster than me . . .

particularly since my eventual reaction to two hundred wedding guests attempting to hold each their own conversation at escalating volume in a crowded ballroom is to stuff Kleenex in my ears and read whatever I happen to have brought with me.

The thing I hate most about parties is how everyone has to talk even when they have nothing to say.

Only idiots think they know it all. This statement is usually accompanied with a story about television.

Heh. We're looking at you, Bill O'Reilly. "Only the shallow know themselves," as Oscar Wilde put it.

a creationist's magnificent clockwork with not a cog or a counterweight out of place, would depress me beyond words.

Yeah. But that's because you haven't been trying to kill your brain all your life.

I don't wish I didn't know that the instrument of God is somewhere out there, playing: I wish I believed that occasionally it was me.

I know how you feel. But I must say that, for me, it very often is you.