MMM

"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."
-John Cheever

"A RED STAMP. If lilies are lily white if they exhaust noise and distance and even dust, if they dusty will dirt a surface that has no extreme grace, if they do this and it is not necessary it is not at all necessary if they do this they need a catalogue."
-Gertrude Stein

"The death ... of a beautiful woman is unquestionably the most poetical topic in the world"
-Edgar Allan Poe