Or was it possible that nobody's reasons could be all that clearly defined? Maybe men and women came together in ways as random and mindless as the m… - Richard Yates

I had read [ Flaubert's Madame Bovary ] before but hadn't studied it the way I'd studied Gatsby and other books; now it seemed ideally suited to serve as a guide, if not a model, for the novel that was taking shape in my mind. I wanted that kind of balance and quiet resonance on every page, that kind of foreboding mixed with comedy, that kind of inexorable destiny in the heart of a lonely, romantic girl. And all of it, of course, would have to be done with an F. Scott Fitzgerald kind of freshness and grace.

"Okay, kid," Walker said, "This is it." And it was the absurdity of the phrase - nobody said "This is it" except in the movies, unless they were phoney bastards like Loomis - that roused Prentice to his first real anger of the morning. He wanted to smash and break the head of anyone stupid enough to say a thing like that; he wanted to kill all the posturing fraudulence in the world, and it was all here before him in this big, dumb, bobbing face.

Aspirando et perseverando was and is the Avon Old Farms school motto