It was Lisa, aged five, whose mother asked her to thank my wife for the peas we had sent them from our garden. 'I thought the peas were awful, I wish you and Mrs. Thurber were dead, and I hate trees,' said Lisa.

Authors of light pieces have, nobody knows why, a genius for getting into minor difficulties: they walk into the wrong apartments, they drink furniture polish for stomach bitters, they drive their cars into the prize tulip beds of haughty neighbors, they playfully slap gangsters, mistaking them for old school friends.

Ours is a precarious language, as every writer knows, in which the merest shadow line often separates affirmation from negation, sense from nonsense, and one sex from the other

A pinch of probability is worth a pound of perhaps.

The pounding of the cylinders increased: ta-pocketa-pocketa-pocketa-pocketa-pocketa.

If you wonder which is the stronger sex, watch which one twists the other around her little finger.

All men should strive to learn before they die, what they are running from, and to, and why.