Admire the world. Relish the love of a gentle woman. Trust in the lord. - John Cheever

...your underwear is clean in case you should be hit by a taxicab and have to be undressed by strangers.

The organizations of men, like men themselves, seem subject to deafness, nearsightedness, lameness, and involuntary cruelty. We seem tragically unable to help one another, to understand one another.

A collection of short stories is generally thought to be a horrendous clinker; an enforced courtesy for the elderly writer who wants to display the trophies of his youth, along with his trout flies.