unearths some literary gems.
***
The ingenuities we practice in order to appear admirable to ourselves would suffice to invent the telephone twice over on a rainy summer morning.
[I didn't realize it would be just as challenging to invent the telephone a second time as the first time; and apparently on sunny days (or in wintertime), the telephone remains uninvented altogether. (:v>]
***
The icy injunction cut in [Yeats's tombstone]--Horseman, pass by!--does little to encourage lingering, especially on the part of a motorist.
***
In order to diminish his baby-look, Maloney eventually grew a small mustache. As it happened, this did not make him look less baby-faced; instead...it made him look like a baby with a mustache.
***
His words...rarely emerged with distinctness from his mustache, and some of us used to speak wistfully of the possibility of combing the words one by one from that obstruction and arranging them in a comprehensible form somewhere outside it.
[N.B. Different mustache (and mustache bearer) from above.]
***
[Those writers and artists who contribute to the New Yorker but rarely set foot in the offices] are strangers, who exist for us as benign ghosts, haunting us not by their presence, as proper ghosts would, but by their absence.
***
Truax is a man so exceedingly secretive that he would gladly make up a story in order not to be able to tell it to anyone.
***
His quickness at mental arithmetic had turned him, in his youth, into a sort of one-man parlor game.
***
[Koren has] a drooping, dark mustache that I fear must make heavy demands on his energy.
***
Facts also amused [Harold Ross]. They didn't need to be funny facts--just facts. A series of factual statements set down with complete gravity could make him laugh because they took him by surprise or amazed him in some inconsequential way.
***
[The Wonderful O] points a moral, or maybe even two morals (the second being that nobody can remember the first)....As a medium in the great séance of letters [Thurber] is incomparable; he has only to utter an incantatory moan, and words levitate, phrases rap out unexpected messages, and whole sentences turn into ectoplasm.
***
[Bonus: One Erskine Hewitt was "named after [a] tombstone," because, the story goes, his father was caught without a name ready at the christening[!], and his panicked eyes fell on a tombstone bearing the surname Erskine.]
