After delving through them, I discovered three local history books, none of any significant value. I offered him £15 for them. He told me that he’d never been so insulted and that he was going to donate them to the Old Bank bookshop. It’s remarkable that a man who was clearly in his eighties had ‘never been so insulted’. I’d been on the receiving end of considerably worse insults by the time I was five years old.

Remainders of the Day, Shaun Bythell

Perhaps the most beautiful of all of these lessons, and the one that deserves to be shouted from the rooftops and heard by everyone, is that we should all pay attention to the mingled beauty and ridiculousness of the people around us; that we should seek to understand them through humor, which, as in the stories of Flannery O’Connor, is at its best and most effective when it is equal parts deadly weapon and act of grace.”

Lauren Groff, preface to Flannery O’Connor’s “A Good Man is Hard to Find and Other Stories”.