He was a tall man with an astonishing and somehow elegant curvature of the spine, formed by an enlarged lower abdomen, which he carried in a stately … - John Cheever

The task of an American writer is not to describe the misgivings of a woman taken in adultery as she looks out of a window at the rain but to describe four hundred people under the lights reaching for a foul ball. This is ceremony.

I'm wicked, as you say, and I'm rude and I'm boorish and I discovered, after marrying Mr Scaddon, that I could be all these things and worse and that there would still be plenty of people to lick my boots.

When I remember my family, I always remember their backs. They were always indignantly leaving places. That’s the way I remember them, heading for an exit.