The farmers may be the backbone of the country, but who wants to be a backbone?

It is difficult for young people to live things down. We will tolerate vice, grand larceny and the quieter forms of murder in our contemporaries... but our children's friends must show a blank service record.

I wasn't actually in love, but I felt a sort of tender curiosity.

He looked at her and for a moment she lived in the bright blue worlds of his eyes, eagerly and confidently.

Thirty--the promise of a decade of loneliness, a thinning list of single men to know, a thinning brief-case of enthusiasm, thinning hair.

It was always the becoming he dreamed of, never the being.

I'm inclined to reserve all judgments, a habit that has opened up many curious natures to me and also made me the victim of not a few veteran bores.