52 Quotes by Monica Hesse

Cooking is a weird thing. In homes, I'd wager it's still women who do more of the cooking.

It's part of the American experience: We deal with mosquitoes in August, airport delays around Thanksgiving, expensive health care and the potential of being shot, at any time, by a semiautomatic weapon as we try to go about the most boring, precious, asinine aspects of our daily lives.

Long before the writer Gillian Flynn popularized the concept of the insufferable 'Cool Girl,' who doesn't exist except in men's fervent fantasies, Hugh Hefner dreamed her, undressed her, and put her in his magazine.

When Holly Madison, Hef's former chief girlfriend, came out with a tell-all book about life in the Mansion, the most bizarre revelation was that, prior to the man's infamous orgies, all of the live-in girlfriends were required to put on matching pink flannel pajamas.

By the end of his life, one has a far easier time picturing Hugh Hefner buying his girlfriend a comfy pair of slippers than one of the satin corsets the Bunnies used to wear.

I can bend my wrist down to my forearm. I can wrench my fingers backward until they rest on my hand. A hitchhiker's thumb might arc into a 90-degree angle; mine will go to 135.

Genes are mysterious things, still unpredictable after all of our research, flecks of humanity that can destroy lives but, just as often, can teach us to appreciate the strange wonder of our existence.