"These words dropped into my childish mind as if you should accidentally drop a ring into a deep well..." — John Steinbeck

Syntax, my lad. It has been restored to the highest place in the republic.

I have never smuggled anything in my life. Why, then, do I feel an uneasy sense of guilt on approaching a customs barrier?

I have owed you this letter for a very long time-but my fingers have avoided the pencil as though it were an old and poisoned tool.

It is true that we are weak and sick and ugly and quarrelsome but if that is all we ever were, we would millenniums ago have disappeared from the face of the earth.