In paradoxical fashion she had always been a woman who easily made friends and yet was friendless.

It's impossible to get a recognizable sandwich in the vicinity of this court or an unadorned piece of meat or fish. Order a tuna on rye, and no doubt it'll be topped with melted cheese and a maraschino cherry.

There are people who were born to stay home rather than follow the beckonings of their imagination: the Emma Bovarys and Anna Kareninas of this world.

Ideology is the sterner face of myth and we're a myth-making people.

Whoever had known sexual jealousy, that most destructive of emotions-and this would be so for men no less than women-had known madness and had now to know sympathy for someone who had been carried by jealousy this one terrible step too far, to murder.

The distinction that Jews have themselves always made between Jews of German origin and Jews of East European origin is as stringent as that between Boston Brahmin and Boston lace-curtain Irish, though much finer.

At best-which is to say, even where our knowledge of a case comes to us only through courtroom evidence-it is difficult for the legal process to keep us at a sanitizing distance from crimes of passion.

Long-married couples balance their checkbooks as a substitute for love-making, or they refuse each other love by protesting one another's financial error or excess.

Behind the contained and orderly lives we lead as members of the respectable middle class there's a terrible human capacity that may one day overwhelm any of us.

I began to think of F. Scott Fitzgrald, the only writer this country had ever produced who knew to the last dollar and cent the moral worth of money.