A Page Of Good Prose Remains Invincible.

...the Sounds Next Door Served As A Kind Of Trip Wire: I Seemed To Stumble And Fall On My Face, Skinning And Bruising Myself Here And There And Scattering My Emotional And Intellectual Possessions. There Was No Point In Pretending That I Had Not Fallen, For When We Are Stretched Out In The Dirt We Must Pick Ourselves Up And Brush Off Our Clothes. This Then, In A Sense, Is What I Did, Reviewing My Considered Opinions On Marriage, Constancy, Man's Nature, And The Importance Of Love. When I Had Picked Up My Possessions And Repaired My Appearance, I Fell Asleep.

I Do Not Understand The Capricious Lewdness Of The Sleeping Mind.

The Task Of An American Writer Is Not To Describe The Misgivings Of A Woman Taken In Adultery As She Looks Out Of A Window At The Rain But To Describe Four Hundred People Under The Lights Reaching For A Foul Ball. This Is Ceremony.

Children Drown, Beautiful Women Are Mangled In Automobile Accidents, Cruise Ships Founder, And Men Die Lingering Deaths In Mines And Submarines, But You Will Find None Of This In My Accounts.

She Cried For Herself, She Cried Because She Was Afraid That She Herself Might Die In The Night, Because She Was Alone In The World, Because Her Desperate And Empty Life Was Not An Overture But An Ending, And Through It All She Could See Was The Rough, Brutal Shape Of A Coffin.