First Sentence:

In spite of all the talk and study about our next years, and all the silent ponderings about what lies within them for our sons [Why only sons? Since I wrote this I have acquired two daughters, and they too shape the pattern's pieces, and the texture of my belief!] it seems plain to us that many things are wrong in the present ones that can be, must be, changed.

“I do not know of any one in the United States who writes better prose.”–W.H. Auden

“Poet of the appetites.”–John Updik