Michael Whiteway

“… but to the girl it naturally seemed evidence of a great and romantic soul. Nobody, she felt, could look so grave and sad, had he not hidden deeps in him.”
― P.G. Wodehouse, Mulliner Nights

“On Fifth Avenue I went into the Trump Tower, a new skyscraper. A guy named Donald Trump, a developer, is slowly taking over New York, building skyscrapers all over town with his name on them, so I went in and had a look around. The building had the most tasteless lobby I had ever seen-all brass and chrome and blotchy red and white marble that looked like the sort of thing that if you saw it on the sidewalk you would walk around it. Here it was everywhere on the floors, up the walls, on the ceiling. It was like being inside somebody's stomach after he'd eaten pizza. "Incredible," I muttered and walked on.”
― Bill Bryson, The Lost Continent: Travels in Small-Town America

“As to secrets, Father, I have but one: if the congregation expects a sermon of forty minutes’ length, then give them one of thirty minutes. If they expect thirty, then give them twenty. In all my years as a rabbi, I have never once had a soul complain to me that a sermon was too short.”
― Geraldine Brooks, People of the Book

“This hard fact must be hammered in until it is constantly on the mind of those who have to contend with RW: Why is it that we must use top-notch elite forces, the cream of the crop of American, British, French, or Australian commando and special warfare schools; armed with the very best that advanced technology can provide; to defeat Viet-Minh, Algerians, or Malay "CT's" [Chinese Terrorists], almost none of whom can lay claim to similar expert training and only in the rarest of cases to equality in fire power?
The answer is very simple: It takes all the technical proficiency our system can provide to make up for the woeful lack of popular support and political savvy of most of the regimes that the West has thus far sought to prop up. The Americans who are now fighting in South Viet-Nam have come to appreciate this fact out of first-hand experience.”
― Bernard B. Fall, Street Without Joy