A Few Typical Restatements

1. Brown's dour prediction could be sloughed off as the self-serving bleat of an expiring politician. He's a dealmaker, a power broker, a convener of interests--in short, the living definition of the career politician so thoroughly out of favor with the public these days. [Douglas Foster, "The Lame-Duck State," Harper's, February 1994, p. 66.]

2. They found the zoo site on an October Sunday: a soft burpy day on which they crossed many bridges. [Tom Robbins, Another Roadside Attraction (New York: Ballantine, 1971), p. 49-50]

3. I knew that I had never before heard and would possibly never again hear America singing at precisely this pitch: ethereal, speedy, an angel choir on Dexamyl. [Joan Didion, "On the Road"]

4. You see, he "feels impelled" to write--feels, presumably, that he has something new to say--and yet his words, like cavalry horses answering the bugle, group themselves automatically into the familiar dreary pattern. [George Orwell, "Politics and the English Language"]

5. She was our baby-sitter, pinner of my mother's hems, exclaimer of praise for my singing, fetcher to my schoolroom of books I had forgotten, and awestruck audience for any elaborate tale I came home with. [Arthur Miller, Timebends, 56]

6. This was a moaning sound, a sighing sound, a sound of strangling, which mingled with the sound of the rain and with a muttering, cursing human voice. [James Baldwin, "Tell Me How Long the Train's Been Gone"]

7. This style of disillusionment--the disillusionment that confesses a regard for principles it can no longer share--was brought to the novel by Conrad, who made an unreflective dedication to duty seem the only course in life that preserves virtue and sanity, and was refined by Hemingway, who reduced the sense of duty to a sense of cost, a willingness not to take from the world more than you can pay for. [Louis Menand, "Books: A Holy Fool," The New Yorker, May 4, 1992, p. 93.]

8. His dogs--repulsive wild things he kept as pets--got in his way. [Cynthia Ozick, "Reflections: Alfred Chester's Wig," The New Yorker, March 30, 1992, p. 80.]

9. He was a figure, a presence, a regret, a light, an ache. [Cynthia Ozick, "Reflections: Alfred Chester's Wig," The New Yorker, March 30, 1992, p. 80.]

10. These zealous teachers, missionaries of the glottis and diaphragm, had effectively suppressed the miscreant northeast Bronx dentalizations of Pelham Bay: a fragrant nook of meadows and vacant lots overgrown with cattails and wildflowers, archeologically pocked with the ruins of old foundations--contractors' start-ups halted by the Depression, and rotting now in mossy caverns. [Cynthia Ozick, "Reflections: Alfred Chester's Wig," The New Yorker, March 30, 1992, p. 82.]

11. Cagni was the spy who had gotten us captured: a complete spy, in every ounce of his flesh, a spy by nature and tendency more than by Fascist conviction or for monetary gain; a spy to hurt, out of a kind of sporty sadism, as the hunter shoots free game. [Primo Levi, The Periodic Table, trans. Raymond Rosenthal (NY: Schocken Books, 1984), p.133.] (Check punctuation.)

12. But there it was; I saw it in the garden, embedded now by the force of its own weight deep in the hedge; and just next to its rear reflector, from the protruding point of a little stick, hung a fragment of cloth. It fluttered wetly, then sagged, then once more was blown full, and I thought it was perhaps a handkerchief the wind had mistakenly impaled there, or else a bit of wayward rag, until I looked again, and recognized it for what it was meant to be: an adornment, a declaration, a trimming, a boast even. A tiny American flag stuck up, waving fitfully--the kind seen at carnivals, and growing out of houseplants, and in the clutch of celebrants--a mean, wild, alien, homeless and comical little flag, heralding not so much nationality as temperament. [Cynthia Ozick, Trust, pp. 138-39.]

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