In novels and autobiographies, the first positive move that the immigrant makes towards assimilation is to buy himself a suit of city clothes.

Crickets, ticks, gnats, chiggers... grass bugs, rotten-timber bugs, leaf bugs, water bugs... everything with six legs and wings and stings was whirring or whining or chirruping.

When New Yorkers tell one about the dangers of their city, the muggings, the dinner parties to which no one turns up for fear of being attacked on the way, the traffic snarl-ups, the bland indifference of the city cops, they are unmistakably bragging.

The only real river I knew was hardly more than a brook. It spilled through a tumbledown mill at the bottom of our road, opened into a little trouty pool, then ran on through water meadows over graveled shallows into Fakenham [England], where it slowed and deepened, gathering strength for the long drifts across muddy flatlands to Norwich and the North Sea.

All this piling up of one technology on top of another-railroad on steamboat, interstate highway on railroad, hydroelectric dam on watermill-had reduced the Mississippi from a wonder of nature to this sluggish canal on the wrong side of the tracks.

The air I was breathing wasn't air: it was a compound of smells, of meat, sweat, popcorn, cooking fat and passed gas.

Somewhere far at the back of the fleet of barges, now lost behind the island, now printing blots of smoke on the sky, was a boat that wasn't a boat, but a blunt white four-story house, all balconies and verandas, mounted over the top of an enormous engine.

Sociology and anthropology are not disciplines which take easily to situations where people are able to live out their fantasies, not just in the symbolic action of ritual, but in the concrete theater of society at large.

I picked at an omelette which had been cooked to the texture of chamois leather and drank, rather more enthusiastically, a bottle of California chablis, feeling my soiltude as a conspicuous caste mark.