"This puzzled my aunts, who like all sensitive older people were convinced that youth had no interest in what it sprang from and so were careful not to bore the young with their own fancies or regrets" (Bethe, p. 11).

"I have gone through my life sure that the people I love will recover, and if, in three cases, I have been wrong, at least I did them no harm and maybe curtained from them the front face of death" (Bethe, p. 15).

"It was true that her family were all thin people, and all good-looking, but Lily was a wispy, romantic specimen unlike her brothers and sisters, who were high-spirited and laughed too much over their own vigor and fancy money deals" (Willy, p. 54).

"I believe what I felt that night was what I was to feel about myself and other people years later: the humiliation of vanity, the...