Quote of the Day (John Cheever, on a Mid-Century Duchess in Rome)

“If you should happen to be the son of a coal miner or were brought up (as I was) in a small town in Massachusetts, the company of a ranking duchess might excite some of those vulgar sentiments that have no place in fiction, but she was beautiful, after all, and beauty has nothing to do with rank. She was slender, but not thin. And rather tall. Her hair was ash blond, and her fine, clear brow belonged against that grandiose and shabby backdrop of limestone and marble, the Roman palace where she lived. It was hers, and, stepping from the shadows of her palace to walk along the river to early Mass, she never quite seemed to leave the grainy light. One would have been surprised but not alarmed to see her join the company of the stone saints and angels on the roof of Sant' Andrea della Valle. This was not the guidebook city but the Rome of today…Donna Carla lived, like you and me, with one foot in the past.” —Pulitzer Prize-winning American novelist and short-story writer John Cheever (1912-1982), "The Duchess,” originally published in The New Yorker, Dec. 13, 1958, reprinted in Some People, Places, and Things That Will Not Appear in My Next Novel (1958)