. “Well, because I've never said anything of any real value in my entire life.” He smiled. “I can yabble on at the mouth, telling people how I feel, asking them how they feel, but it's just fillin' the world up with more noise.”

I sometimes wish we could wipe out the history of the last two thousand years and just get back to that manger and see the babe at its mother's breast and feel the wonder-glow in the mother's heart.

The laughs start percolating after the wives split, natch, and their husbands, accompanied by a troika of jesters — Gary (the peerlessly funny Stephen Merchant), […]

[…] he had continued [the treatment] to the day on which I saw him […] with relief of pain and improvement of his general feelings, but without any arrestation of his decline in strength and weight;