“Not for the first time Spooner was reminded that marriage was not the straighforward assembly the instruction book led you to believe.”

“Spooner noticed another, smaller Marine Corps tattoo encircling Marlin's ankle: Semper Fi Forever. Everywhere he went these days, Spponer witnessed America's crying need for more copy editors.”

“A newspaper story, like anything else, is more attractive from a distance, when it first comes to you, than it is when you get in close and agonize over the details. Which I presume is how Yardley got in the habit of keeping himself at a distance.”

“It is now 55 years since my last book report, which is a long time to live with a guilty conscience. So here it is: In the spring of 1956 I wrote a highly favorable review of the Bible without reading a word of it, and it was the last A I ever got in English. Why it has taken so long to come clean I'm not sure, except I have always been extremely sensitive about my academic reputation.”

“Sometimes," he said, "you've got to watch people a long time to see who they are.”

“To see certain things, you have to be lying on your back with tears in your eyes and a scalding potato in your mouth. It's possible, I think, that you have to be hurt to see anything at all.”

“I had noticed, even then, that there were certain women whom other women instinctively disliked, and that these women invariably had more bait in the water than the women who disliked them.”