"The Dud Avacado"

The titular analogy arrives rather late in the book, apt and vivid: "You know, these American girls are just like avocados. .. Who ever even heard of an avocado sixty years ago? Yes, that's what we are growing nowadays... a hard center with the tender meat all wrapped up in a shiny casing. So green - so eternally green."

• After that.. the world is her ash tray.
• Impressive enough, but let's face it, there was nothing - well - spontaneous about his looks.
  
• It looked as if I were going to spend the rest of the night one line ahead of the dialogue.
• The Scoundrel: he removes the boutonniere from the lapel of his dinner jacket and murmuring Forgive-me-my-dear-for-stooping-to-symbolism, he tosses the flower into his highball and drowns it with a squirt of the soda syphon.
• My strategy was to... very over-the-shoulder, off-the-shoulder, daintily treading all over everybody's toes, in I would waft, impress the hell out of them, and win the day.
• Behind these spectacles blinked eyes that gawped and stared insensitively at anything not absolutely commonplace to the right side of the five-block area on which he had built his house in Wichita, Kansas.
  
• It was a matter of the strictest principle with her never to talk to a woman younger than herself.
• (Judith in hospital:) I forced myself to look steadily at the grotesque mortality of hair, eyebrows and teeth. I felt the earth turn.
• "Hungarians don't like each other, they understand each other."

__ It always made me sad to see that there were so many unmarried women in the world - sadder still to realized that they were largely unseen because there were so few public places they dared brave without a sense of strain.
__ What was the use of remembering? If it was unpleasant, it was unpleasant. If it was pleasant, it was over.

my tattered cloak of carelessness,     toothily intellectual
being strangled to death by cobwebs,    our frantic gloom
clenched with seriousness,     wistfully good-looking
some mournful little town, one of Nature's Airports
Laocoön,    Cyril Connolly

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