:: Classic Fiction

"The boy, Leonard Bast, stood at the extreme verge of gentility. He was not in the abyss but he could see it, and at times people whom he knew had dropped in, and counted no more. He knew that he was poor, and would admit it; he would have died sooner than confess any inferiority to the rich. This was splendid of him. But he was inferior to most rich people, there is not the least doubt of it. He was not as courteous as the average rich man, nor as intelligent, nor as healthy, nor as loveable."

"'He sat down at the old piano and played as he had never played; and if there were those who think he had better had been kicking a football I can only say that I wholly agree with them. For at the end of a time that under his influence I had quite ceased to measure I started up with a strange sense of having literally slept at my post. It was after luncheon, and by the schoolroom fire, and yet I hadn't really in the least slept; I had only done something much worse - I had forgotten. Where, all this time, was Flora? When I put the question to Miles he played on a minute before answering, and then could only say: 'Why, my dear, how do I know?' - breaking, moreover, into a happy laugh which immediately after, as if it were a vocal accompaniment, he prolonged into incoherent extravagant song."

"'That's a boy,' Ida said.'You nearly had me scared there for a moment. Nice thing it would have been for me if you'd passed out in this taxi...But men are funny with me that way. Always trying to make out there's something wrong, money or the wife or the heart. You aren't the first one who said he was dying. Never anything infectious though. Want to make the most of their last hours and all the rest of it. It comes of me being so big, I suppose. They think I'll mother them. I'm not saying I didn't fall for it the first time. 'The doctors only give me a month,' he said to me - that was five years ago. I see him regular now at Henekey's. 'Hullo, you old ghost,' I always say to him, and he stands me to oysters and a Guinness.'"

"The turkey was no longer moist. This conclusion was unavoidable. Above all, she and Benjamin agreed on the necessity of moist turkey...One had to guard against dryness in leftovers. One had to reheat gravy. And Elena had failed here. She knew if she ever suffered a real and debilitating mental illness, its onset would not be the result of a failed marriage or because of some twentieth-century spiritual impoverishment; it would be caused instead by these details, by a pen mark on a designer suit, by the slight warp in her Paul Simon album, or by the acrid taste of old ice cubes. These small things led to a bottomless pit of loneliness beside which even Cambodia paled."