A potlatch is similar to a court case in that both are prohibitively expensive; both involve lengthy speeches and the vigorous examination and debate of the actions, rights and legal responsibilities of the participants. One has food, singing and spiritual rites; the other, not so much.

We can begin to become more diligent and concerned at home by telling the people we love that we love them. Such expressions do not need to be flowery or lengthy. We simply should sincerely and frequently express love.

The first recipe for happiness is: avoid too lengthy meditation on the past.

Whatever universe a professor believes in must at any rate be a universe that lends itself to lengthy discourse. A universe definable in two sentences is something for which the professorial intellect has no use. No faith in anything of that cheap kind!

I am at the moment writing a lengthy indictment against our century. When my brain begins to reel from my literary labors, I make an occasional cheese dip.

That would be a ghostwriter worth keeping hold of! But my books are relatively short. A GRRM volume is well over twice as long. I think my main asset is that I write things once. I don't have the draft draft draft disease that some suffer from. I've never deleted a page and rewritten it, some authors rewrite whole chapters or remove or add characters. That's going to make it a lengthy process.

A graceful refusal is better than a lengthy promise.

When I speak of 'cycles ' I am referring to lengthy intervals of relative homogeneity if not in the resolving of problems than at least with respect to the consistency of their capacity to productively irritate.

The first recipe for happiness is: avoid too lengthy meditation on the past.

Whatever universe a professor believes in must at any rate be a universe that lends itself to lengthy discourse. A universe definable in two sentences is something for which the professorial intellect has no use. No faith in anything of that cheap kind!

But when you're deprived of it for a lengthy period then you value human companionship. But you have to survive and so you devise all kinds of mental exercises and it's amazing.