Sublime

Small talk and just casually being around someone is a vastly underappreciated stage in the process of getting to know someone. Sometimes you can learn more about a person by watching how they talk to a waiter than by asking some profound question about their philosophy of life.

The idea of middle age—never mind old age, God forbid one hundred years!—is the violent opposite of everything Hollywood is based upon, which, as anyone can see, is and has always been beauty: youthful, feminine, saintly beauty like Mary Pickford, or disillusioned, lost beauty like Greta Garbo; beauty without a whisper of fading, sagging, or

“Is anyone shocked?” Picoult tweeted. “Would love to see the NYT rave about authors who aren’t male literary darlings.” Weiner’s addition was a variation on the idea she’d been articulating for years—“When a man writes about family and feelings, it’s literature with a capital L, but when a woman considers the same subjects, it’s romance, or a beach

“Sailer’s Law of Female Journalism,”

If Madame Girand and her husband have the stamina to keep at it for the next thirty or forty years, La Fontaine might join those other restaurants, large and small, that have become institutions. You find them all over France, places like Chez l’Ami Louis in Paris or the Auberge in La Môle. They are not always the most fashionable of restaurants,

“She doesn’t drink,” said Sandy, “except for sherry on her birthday, half a bottle between the seven of us.” Miss Mackay could be observed mentally scoring drink off her list of things against Miss Brodie. “Oh, that’s all I meant,” said Miss Mackay.

But like most Upper East Side girls, Nina thought, she was too coddled to be wily.