Jeff

“The Americans, who are the most efficient people on the earth, have carried [phrase-making] to such a height of perfection and have invented so wide a range of pithy and hackneyed phrases that they can carry on an amusing and animated conversation without giving a moment’s reflection to what they are saying and so leave their minds free to consider the more important matters of big business and fornication.”
― W. Somerset Maugham, Cakes and Ale

“All that remains of that minute is time in all its purity, bone-white time.”
― Marguerite Duras, The Ravishing of Lol Stein

“I have an idea that the only thing which makes it possible to regard this world we live in without disgust is the beauty which now and then men create out of the chaos.”
― W. Somerset Maugham, The Painted Veil

“War with Canada was far less of an enigma to me than what Aunt Evelyn was going to use for a toilet during the night”
― Philip Roth, The Plot Against America