Nevil Shute's On the Beach is no Christmas carol, but it seems to me a remarkably fine novel, one which I read, in the peculiarly repulsive phrase, with my eyes glued to the page.

Writing well is the best revenge.

[Hospitalized and pressing the nurse's button before dictating letters to her secretary:] This should assure us of at least forty-five minutes of undisturbed privacy.

Yet, as only New Yorkers know, if you can get through the twilight, you'll live through the night.

And if my heart be scarred and burned, The safer, I, for all I learned.

Sometimes I think I'll give up trying, and just go completely Russian and sit on a stove and moan all day.

I regret to say that during the first act of this, I fell so soundly asleep that the gentleman who brought me piled up a barricade of overcoat, hat, stick, and gloves between us to establish a separation in the eyes of the world, and went into an impersonation of A Young Man Who Has Come to the Theater Unaccompanied.