The dusk was performing its customary intransitive operation of "gathering".

The only result my father got for his money was the certainty that his son had laid faultlessly the foundation of a system of heavy drinking and could be always relied upon to make a break of at least twenty-five even with a bad cue.

Moderation, we find, is an extremely difficult thing to get in this country.

It is clear enough that you are making some distinction in what you said, that there is some nicety of terminology in your words. I can't quite follow you.

The dusk was performing its customary intransitive operation of "gathering".

Anybody who has the courage to raise his eyes and look sanely at the awful human condition ... must realize finally that tiny periods of temporary release from intolerable suffering is the most that any individual has the right to expect.

Having placed in my mouth sufficient bread for three minutes' chewing, I withdrew my powers of sensual perception and retired into the privacy of my mind, my eyes and face assuming a vacant and preoccupied expression. I reflected on the subject of my spare-time literary activities. One Beginning and one ending for a book was a thing I did not agree with. A good book may have three openings entirely dissimilar and inter-related only in the prescience of the author, or for that matter one hundred times as many endings.