One would never have guessed that the world had such a capacity for genuine grief. The most we can do is exploit our memories of his excellence. - John Cheever

Wisdom we know is the knowledge of good and evil not the strength to choose between the two.

I sometimes go back to walk through the ghostly remains of Sutton Place where the rude, new buildings stand squarely in one another’s river views.

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.