21.  As a community, to be able to hit the world first with our ideas, has a bigger bang than at the end."

22.  As a composer, I think one of the sicknesses of our age is obsession with the past.

23.  Deprived of our rituals, some of us have inadvertently been exposed to political candidates.

24.  Delight your friends and family with our tried-and-true strawberry shortcake.

25.  Dellinger recalled, "At the Olympics in Atlanta at least one of our wrestlers was cutting weight so hard they rehydrated him with an I.V.

26.  Despite active quibbles, we're comfortable with our conclusions.

27.  Despite all of our modern scientific advances, we've yet to come up with a formula that can make a mother love her children.

28.  Despite all our pretensions, we were just ragged animals scurrying across the crust of the earth.

29.  Derek Fisher, for instance, on how far we reached inside ourselves during our near-death experience: "Deep.

30.  Despite all the stated concern about the environment, we are clearly not much farther along in our tree culture than we were a century ago.