Related:

• The cable had passed us by; the dish was the only hope, and eventually we were all forced to turn to it.
  By the summer of '85, the valley had more satellite dishes per capita than an Eskimo village on the north slope of Alaska....
• The best thing for being sad," replied Merlin, beginning to puff and blow, "is to learn something.
  That's the only thing that never fails. You may grow old and trembling in your anatomies, you may lie awake at night listening to the disorder of your veins, you may miss your only love, you may see the world about you devastated by evil lunatics, or know your honour trampled in the sewers of baser minds....
• The best thing for being sad, replied Merlin, beginning to puff and blow, is to learn something.
  That's the only thing that never fails. You may grow old and trembling in your anatomies, you may lie awake at night listening to the disorder of your veins, you may miss your only love, you may see the world about you devastated by evil lunatics, or know your honour trampled in the sewers of baser minds....
• Lisa: [on the phone] Dad, I broke my last saxophone reed, and I need you to get me a new one.
  Homer: Uh, isn't this the kind of thing your mother's better at?...
• Goodman: Now, who knows how the Skinners could have resolved this problem?
  [everyone puts their hands up] Without resorting to violence....
• My central memory of that time seems to hang on one or five or maybe forty nights -- or very early mornings -- when I left the Fillmore half-crazy and
  instead of going home, aimed the big 650 Lightning across the Bay Bridge at a hundred miles an hour ....
• He saw the crowd and thought of the waves moving through them, breaking into white, swallowing foam.
  The small figures dimly sensed the eddies of the waves as paradox, as riddle, and heard the tick of time without knowing what they sensed, and clung to their linear illusions of past and future, of progression, of their opening births and yawning deaths to come....