Of course. And isn't that the worst kind of loss? When you don't even realise the value of something until you've thrown it away? - Richard Yates

After a second or two he thrust the muzzle forward and broke out the pane of glass, less because he knew it would make for a better aim than because it was what gunmen always did behind windows in movies.

Because you see there are millions and millions of people in New York - more people than you can possibly imagine, ever - and most of them are doing something that makes sound. Maybe talking, or playing the radio, maybe closing doors, maybe putting their forks down on their plates if they're having dinner, or dropping their shoes if they're going to bed - and because there are so many of them, all those little sounds add up and come together in a kind of hum. But it's so faint - so very, very faint - that you can't hear it unless you listen very carefully for a long time.

Had dinner tonight with an old boyhood friend from the years 1937-39 when I lived in a town called Scarborough [i.e. Stephen Benedict], whose amateur theatre group ("The Beechwood Players") served as the original for "The Laurel Players" in my book. He found it incredible, and I found it spooky, that I had completely failed to remember the name of a winding blacktop road in that town on which he and I and many of our schoolmates used to pass the most impressionable hours of our formative years: "Revolutionary Road".