Patrick’s Reviews > Speedboat > Status Update

“We may win this year. We may lose it all. It is not going as well as we thought. Posterity, anyway, does not know everything. The simplest operations of life—voting in a booth, filling out returns, remembering whether or not one has just taken a pill—are very difficult.... As is clear from the parking regulations, however, there are situations in which you are not entitled to stop.”

“Our full professors, tenured faculty, teach H.B.A., or Hours By Appointment; that is, never. Young instructors, hoping for tenure here, are scheduled to teach days and nights. The idea is that as long as an instructor is required to be in a classroom every hour, he will not have the time to write or publish anything. Not having published, he will never earn his tenure.“

“She was a dynamite girl and he was an aces fellow. On the day he at last agreed by phone to marry her, the switchboard operators were overjoyed. For six months they had listened, in sympathy and indig. nation, to the tears, the threats, the partings and reconciliations.
They were so unequivocally for the girl that only the purest professionalism kept them, at times, from breaking in.” This book 😆🙂

“Things have changed very much, several times, since I grew up, and, like everyone in New York except the intellectuals, I have led several lives and I still lead some of them.”

I like this book already. There’s some nice humor in it already too 🥹