The little fan whirring in the back room of the Thrift Shop was no more adequate for ventilation than a scrawny bird flapping its wings. The only thing it riffled was the sales chart thumbtacked on the wall directly above the fan and kept up to date by the volunteer who had a firmer grasp of arithmetic than any of the other ladies. She had filled in neatly, with black marking pencil, the weekly and monthly figures on the secondhand merchandise sold for charity; the totals for April, may, June and July had shot up so violently it looked as if the ladies had robbed a bank and added their loot to the take.

--Beauty Sleep (1977)

As an example of Mather's talents, Silas tells the rather ghoulish story of a mother who kept grieving because she hadn't had a picture taken of her teen-age son before he died. Six months after the funeral, she was still brooding about it, and a relative said, "I'll bet Mather could do it."

The glass-topped coffin was dug up, and Mather, happy over this interesting challenge, ordered it propped up endwise, against a hitching post. Silas, who was there as a helper, ends the tale, "And you know, he no sooner got a good picture than that corpse crumbled into dust. That kind of bothered Mather. He said, 'I don't think I'll take another job like this-- unless I need the money'."

-- from The Great Oildorado (1959)

When I was a senior in high school in Franklin, Pennsylvania, avant-garde was still only a murky gleam in some foreigner's eye, and Lady Gregory was considered pretty far out as a playwright. What we wanted for our senior class play was a drawing-room comedy, or at least that's what the English teacher who doubled as our drama coach wanted. The fact that none of us on the play-reading committee had ever seen a drawing room, to our knowledge, was no handicap at all. We had the Samuel French catalogue to guide us, and it not only gave clear plot synopses, but even more vital, it told right off how many characters and which sex-- say, 5 m., 9 f. We had more females than males around-- perhaps a chronic imbalance of all amateur theater groups-- so the more f. the better.

I wasn't in the actual cast-- I had a voice which has since been described as having "the timbre of a cuckoo clock"-- but I took a very active part in the production as left-wing prompter. If it hadn't been for me, the heroine, Olivia Dangerfield, would have wrecked one of the most important lines in the play, when she said to her negro mammy, "Old dear, don't forget to feed my doves." This established her character in a flash, showing as it did that although Olivia might behave like a madcap, underneath she was a romantic, well-born Virginia lady, the sort who kept doves to flutter with. Even her saying "Old dear" proved that her ancestors came straight from England.

On opening night the girl playing Olivia read the line as, "Mandy, remember to feed my pigeons," which is not the same thing at all, as I was quick to point out in a carrying tone from the wings. Thanks to my helpful prompting, she had to go back and say, "I mean, old dear, forget the pigeons and feed the doves." For some reason, the audience took this for wit, and laughed harder than they did at some of the real bon mots in the dialogue, such as, "It's the motor car that makes country life possible-- and the Ford that makes it probable."

-- from "A Stage Full of Legs without Bodies"

She didn't look like an advocate of revolution-- black, red, or even white. She looked more like the kind of woman who would clap for Tinkerbell. She was built like a bean pot, but a soft, melted-down bean pot, with short legs and a flattish lid sprouting gray frizzled hair. She was beaming at Chester so nicely, with such a ladylike air, he decided she was merely barmy. One of those barmy old maids of good family that New Englad overproduced. But the last thing he wanted was to get mixed up with any crackpots, however harmless. His new public relations man had warned him on that. He turned away and made a show of listening to Four Elbows' windup: "...six lessons in teen-age POISE-- or conversational RUSSIAN made EASY." She folded her elbows to subside.

The fixed-versus-floating-zone belligerents were still muttering when the chairman called eagerly, "Ah, Miss Washburn, there you are, just in time." He didn't add, "to create a diversion," but the thought hung in the air.

--from Heat Lightning (1969)

I am less sympathetic with people who search for Freudian undertones in my art work. "Do you know what it symbolized when you painted that large red flower in the lower left-hand corner?" they ask in hushed tones. After I explain that the phone rang while I was holding my brush over the paper and, in leaping up to answer, I dropped a blob of red, which later was expanded into a flower because it looked less messy that way, they still act as if my impromptu posy were a dozen long-stemmed neuroses.

-- from "Look! I'm Framed." (1949)

But like Brady, Mather was no see-the-birdie, smile-please sort of photographer. He advertised "Ambrotypes, Porcelains, Double Position (superior)," but his manner and methods weren't always guaranteed to flatter the subject. When an early customer brought in her small son with a bow tie stretched from ear to ear, she complained, after seeing the photographs Mather took of the boy, "They're homely."

"Well, dammit, ma'am," Mather said. "Look at yourself and your husband. What can you expect of that union?"

--from The Great Olidorado (1959)

She looked at her wrist watch and saw that it was no help-- 4:13-- having stopped at that hour of the night when people often die, or would like to. More than once she had wanted to herself. She had had insomnia so badly she often read late and slept fitfully till nine or ten. Since giving up her regular job in the publishing firm two years before, to avoid seeing Alvin again, she had made herself punch a mental time clock every day, but in an out-of-kilter way, on a different shift, so that she wouldn't mesh with anyone's life but her own.

-- from Open the Door (1966)