The New England spirit does not seek solutions in a crowd; raw light and solitariness are less dreaded than welcomed as enhancers of our essential selves.

The breezes taste Of apple peel. The air is full Of smells to feel- Ripe fruit, old footballs, Burning brush, New books, erasers, Chalk, and such. The bee, his hive, Well-honeyed hum, And Mother cuts Chrysanthemums. Like plates washed clean With suds, the days Are polished with A morning haze.

The difficulty with humorists is that they will mix what they believe with what they don't; whichever seems likelier to win an effect.

By the time a partnership dissolves, it has dissolved.

The essential self is innocent, and when it tastes its own innocence knows that it lives for ever.

Narrative and metaphysics alike become flimsy and frivolous if they venture too far from the home base of all humanism - the single, simple human life that we all more or less lead, with its crude elementals of nurture and appetite, love and competition, the sunshine of well-being and the inevitable night of death. We each live this tale. Fiction has no reason to be embarrassed about telling the same story again and again, since we all, with infinite variations, experience the same story.

Why does one never hear of government funding for the preservation and encouragement of comic strips, girlie magazines and TV soap operas? Because these genres still hold the audience they were created to amuse and instruct.