Muffled lives explode in understatements.

It even looks exactly like a real book, with pages and print and dust jacket and everything. This disguise is extremely clever, considering the contents: the longest lounge act never performed in the history of the Catskills.

The most important outcome of education is to help students become independent of formal education.

In the end, the Tribune lost touch with the world it was supposed to reach; it mattered passionately, but almost exclusively, to those who worked for it.

People joked that Forster became more renowned with every book he did not write.

Those who have spent time familiarizing themselves with the topography of Greeneland will have some idea of what must happen next.

He offers the never-never land of convenient cliches. a world where statesmen say, "We've not heard the end of this," where people turn "scarlet with anger," where the price of gold goes "sky-high" and where the unsuspecting outsider "little knew what fate had in store for him."

The image of the reporter as a nicotine-stained Quixote, slugging back Scotch while skewering city hall with an expose ripped out of a typewriter on the crack of deadline, persists despite munificent evidence to the contrary.

Paperbacks blink in and out of print like fireflies. They also, as older collectors have ruefully discovered, fade and fall apart even more rapidly than their owners.