[Note. The next posting after today’s will be on July 17, 2017]

“I had no father—at least, I never knew my father—but Zipper had one.” Joseph Roth, Zipper and his Father.

“Deceiving others is an essential part of everyday social interaction.” Aldert Vrij, Detecting Lies and Deceit: The Psychology of Lying and the Implications for Professional Practice.

“The courtship and remarriage of an old widower is always made more difficult when middle-aged children are involved—especially when there are unmarried daughters.” Peter Taylor, A Summons to Memphis.

“But, you may say, we asked you to speak about women and fiction—what has that got to do with a room of one’s own.” Virginia Woolf, A Room of One’s Own.

“Who wouldn’t be skeptical when a man claims to have spent an entire weekend with God, in a shack no less?” William P. Young, The Shack.

“Plaquemines Parish is the end of the line—a narrow, fertile peninsula more than a hundred miles long, stretching out into the blue waters of the Gulf of Mexico.” Glen Jeansonne, Leander Perez: Boss of the Delta.

“In that place, where they tore the nightshade and blackberry patches from their roots to make room for the Medallion City Golf Course, there was once a neighborhood.” Toni Morrison, Sula.

“At my university, and doubtless others as well, there is a recurring, seasonal clash involving life and death, order and disorder—and lawn care.” Norman J. Finkel, Commonsense Justice: Jurors’ Notions of the Law.

“Even the smallest stone in a riverbed has the entire history of the universe inscribed upon it.” Hikaru Okuizumi, The Stones Cry Out.

“No one is left from the Glenn Valley, Pennsylvania, Bridge Club who can tell us precisely when or why the group broke up, even though its forty-odd members were still playing regularly as recently as 1990, just as they had done for more than half a century.” Robert D. Putnam, Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community.”

“People do not give it credence that a fourteen-year-old girl could leave home and go off in the wintertime to avenge her father’s blood, but it did not seem so strange then, although I will say it did not happen every day.” Charles Portis, True Grit.

“Who was this man whose baby son had been taken from his crib and murdered?” Ludovic Kennedy, The Airman and the Carpenter: The Lindbergh Kidnapping and the Framing of Richard Hauptmann.

“Either forswear fucking others or the affair is over.” Philip Roth, Sabbath’s Theater.