On the New York theater audience: “I have a fine play in mind I’ll write for them someday. The curtain slides up on a stage bare except for a machine gun facing the audience, then the actor walks upstage, adjusts the machine gun, and blasts them.”

His mother’s face had not always looked so round. He could remember it pale and maidenly, when the cheekbones showed and when it was soft but not fleshy and relatively unpolluted by woe. Mrs. Blodgette wasn’t forty yet. 

At nine in the morning, when all was fresh, the starched uniforms of the nurses bustled more briskly, their curious caps sat more pertly, and the illusion of sanitation and good cheer bloomed on the fifth floor of the Private Pavilion more brightly than at any hour of the day.