`` That was a terrible thing to do '', I said to Oso.

`` But that was war '', I said.

Still, I was disgusted with myself for agreeing with Montero's methods.

In the brief moment I had to talk to them before I took my post on the ring of defenses, I indicated I was sickened by the methods men employed to live and trade on the river.

Next to him was a young boy I was sure had sat near me at one of the trading sessions.

Now under me I could see him for what he really was, a boy dressed up in streaks of paint.

Such was my state of mind that I did not question the possibility of this ; ;

under the circumstances I was only too willing to confess all.

I was nearly thirty at the time.

It was dark and, I sensed, very large ; ;

Sometimes I was aware of people moving about in the darkness.

This impressed me, until I realized how limited was his sphere of influence.

I felt certain he was really a spineless little man.

Once, pressing him, I learned that his job was only part-time, in the afternoons when nothing went on in the hall.

In the mornings, I was informed, fluorescent tubes, similar to the one above the counter, illuminated the entire hall.

I was shown, instead, a batch of white tickets of the sort handed out, he told me, every morning.

Now, here was something of obvious importance to me, yet when I reached for the tickets he snatched them away from my hand.

It was, I felt, possible that they were men who, having received no tickets for that day, had remained in the hall, to sleep perhaps, in the corners farthest removed from the counter with its overhead light.

I felt certain it was self-appointed.

I decided to see no more of the clerk until the processing of my papers was completed.

I was constantly searching for clues around the neighborhood of the hall.

`` That quirt -- I ought to use it on you, where it would do the most good.

We spoke of the need for advertising, and I agreed that the deep dive would be most useful for publicity.

I want the room in the attic prepared for him He is a most unusual lad, quite precocious in many ways.

Time's editor, Thomas Griffith, in his book, The Waist-High Culture, wrote: `` most of what was different about it ( the Deep South ) I found myself unsympathetic to.

Asked which institution most needs correction, I would say the corporation as it exists in America today.

and, `` I do think that families are the most beautiful things in all the world '', burst out Jo some five hundred pages later in that popular story of the March family, which had first appeared when Henrietta was eight ; ;

Whether you experienced the passion of desire I have, of course, no way of knowing, nor indeed have I wished with even the most fleeting fragment of a wish to know, for the fact that one constitutes by one's mere existence so to speak the proof of some sort of passion makes any speculation upon this part of one's parents' experience more immodest, more scandalizing, more deeply unwelcome than an obscenity from a stranger.

For innocence, of all the graces of the spirit, is I believe the one most to be prayed for.

`` Everything tasted differently from what it does on land and those things I was most fond of at home, I loathed the most here '', Ann noted.

This is the most delightful trial I have ever had '', she decided.

I assume that the number of readers of this anthology who regard themselves as morally perfect is small, and that most readers are willing to consider procedures by which they may gain more insight into themselves and better understanding of others.

after all, the large ( and probably unreliable ) Reader's Digest literature on the `` most unforgettable character I ever met '' deals with village grocers, country doctors, favorite if illiterate aunts, and so forth.

I am not aware of great attention by any of these authors or by the psychotherapeutic profession to the role of literary study in the development of conscience -- most of their attention is to a pre-literate period of life, or, for the theologians of course, to the influence of religion.

`` I thank you most heartily for being here.

I did not feel it presumptuous to expect that the Creator would be at least as just as the most righteous of His creatures ; ;

There were several men of ninety or more whom I knew first or last, all of whom were still productive and most of whom knew one another as if they had naturally come together at the apex of their lives.

Never once during the trying thirties did I come so close to succumbing to the private climate of opinion as to grant Russian communism even that most weasel-worded of encomiums `` an interesting experiment ''.

Without really changing the general subject, I take this opportunity to confess that I am troubled by doubts, not only about pacifism, but also when asked to join in the protest against a law that most of those who consider themselves humane and liberal seem to regard as obviously barbarous ; ;

the combination of the Jewish intellectual tradition and the sensibility needed to be a writer created in my circle the most potent and incredible intellectual-literary ambition I have ever seen or could ever have imagined.

`` I had natural sock '', he says, ' as a storyteller and was precociously good at description, dialogue, and most of the other staples of the fiction-writer's trade but I was bugged by a mammoth complex of thoughts and feelings that prevented me from doing more than just diddling the surface of sustained fiction-writing ''.