Sublime

perfunctory

This is the true and exact account of the Great Cigar Fraud, and the moral of it is this–that civilisation is founded upon abstractions.

Making an imaginative leap

The one who’d asked had a sideburn and the invulnerable smile of someone who’s had two airport cocktails and nothing but nuts.

So she took him for a walk in the bright sunlight and they were both caught and killed by the shrike’s brother, a shrike named Stoop. MORAL: Early to rise and early to bed makes a male healthy and wealthy and dead.

“Mr. Constant,” he said, “right now you’re as easy for the Bureau of Internal Revenue to watch as a man on a street corner selling apples and pears. But just imagine how hard you would be to watch if you had a whole office building jammed to the rafters with industrial bureaucrats—men who lose things and use the wrong forms and create new forms and

As seen by his neighbours, he is as safe as if immured in a fortress; but as seen by himself he may be forever careering through the sky or crashing towards the earth in a flying–ship.

Perkins often told writers: “It is always better to give a little less than the reader wants, than more.”