Debbie Roth

“Among the latest follies in fiction is the perpetual demand for stories shorter and shorter still. The only thing to do is to meet this demand at the source and check it. Any of the stories below, if left to soak overnight in a barrel of rainwater, will swell to the dimensions of a dollar-fifty novel.”
― Stephen Leacock, Further Foolishness

“Enough of this nonsense,” Fern Hampton interrupted. “What this church needs is a vanity table in the women’s rest room.” Sam sat in his folding chair, thinking of churches that had homeless shelters and soup kitchens and raised money to send doctors to Africa to help lepers. He wished there was a leper in Harmony they could help. There’s nothing like a leper to stir up a church, he thought.”
― Philip Gulley, Just Shy of Harmony: A Harmony Novel

“At the moment when Mrs. Griffin had been notified of her husband’s death, she was in bed with her lover at the Hotel del Coronado in California, and took the news that she was a widow rather well. She untwined herself from the arms of Admiral Paul Henry Bastedo who served under Secretary of the Navy Franklin Roosevelt, and proposed they get married in the morning so he could be her date at her late husband’s funeral. To the tabloids’ delight, the newlyweds took Helen Prindeville Griffin Bastedo’s private railway car to Lake Forest, Illinois, to attend the service. The act so outraged the Griffin family that they used their juice with Union Pacific to divert the train and the unlucky passengers coupled to Helen’s private car. The train choo-chooed deep into Wisconsin, denying the newlyweds their grand entrance to the funeral.”
― Griffin Dunne , The Friday Afternoon Club: A Family Memoir

“Dost thou love me? I know thou wilt say “Ay.” These discontinuous fragments, glittering and dark, coalesced in a bewildering lunar brilliance. Fever and a silver chill contended within the child; he had become both voices crying against each other amid the fruit trees. His tight dark home, so crammed with love of him, had broken open, released him into the infinite freedom, the total coolness, of impersonation. As the light in the living room failed, he blindly faced his life, discovering himself to be, to have been since birth, an actor, an excuse for the emotions of others.”
― John Updike, Higher Gossip: Essays and Criticism