Irwin Shaw

He was going to be seventeen years old soon and another year after that he could enlist.

caramels from a package

The kid seemed like a nice boy and he wouldn’t know automatically that he was supposed to have a low opinion of his uncle.

“God,” Gretchen said finally, “it doesn’t seem possible that we all have the same genes, does it?”

All those scolding articles I wrote that everybody thought were so smart, were digs at America because it produced men like Teddy Boylan and made life easy for men like Teddy Boylan.”

“You do? You think you’d have gone to college without Teddy Boylan’s money? You think you’d dress the way you do or be so interested in success and money and how to get there the fastest way possible without Teddy Boylan? Do you think somebody else would have sought you out and taken you to concerts and art galleries and pampered you through school, and given you all that lordly confidence in yourself, if it hadn’t been Teddy Boylan?” She finished her second martini.

“I am enjoying to the utmost the glorious fruits of sloth.

I am thirty-five years old and I have enough money, both capital and yearly income, so that I can live extremely well for the rest of my life.

Once you are rich in America, it takes genius or overpowering greed to fall back into poverty.

“I want to be as tired as you. I don’t want to be one of those American women who lie around all day and then when their husbands come home, drag the poor beasts out every evening, because they’re bursting with unused vigor. The energy gap has ruined more marriages by half than adultery.”