Quote of the Day (Jean Stafford, on a Group of Midcentury Train Passengers)

“[A]lways on the train were the most pathetic travelers in the world….Each year there was always a group consisting of a gaunt young woman and three or four small children who ate graham crackers out of an oiled paper parcel and whined nasally. Years of hard work and bad food had given the women a canine look in the mouth and eyes; their skin was brown and old; if their teeth had been replaced, the false ones were gold, but generally there were only spaces where they had rotted and fallen out. The groups varied little, but they could not always have been the same one, for the children were the same size. The mother’s hair was always reddish brown and hung about her sunken face like dirty strings, but her children were tow-headed and their eyebrows were too light to see. Sometimes they had skin diseases or birthmarks or Hutchinson’s teeth.”—American novelist and short-story writer Jean Stafford (1915-1979), The Mountain Lion: A Novel (1947)