The Corner

Sometimes You Read a Sentence and Say . . .

. . . Damn! I wish I’d written that.

From Patrick Leigh Fermor’s A Time to Keep Silence, a slim book on monastic life.

(The Damn! sentence is the second one; the first is the set-up):

“If my first days in the Abbey had been a period of depression, the unwinding process, after I had left, was ten times worse. The Abbey was at first a graveyard; the other world seemed afterwards, by contrast, an inferno of noise and vulgarity entirely populated by bounders and sluts and crooks.”

Historian Richard Brookhiser is a senior editor of National Review and a senior fellow at the National Review Institute.
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