I wouldn't have thought that Camille, of all people, who's so sort of peasant-earthy, like a hausfrau in Brueghel, would be such a fantasist, would you? - Middle Age : A Romance (2001) by Joyce Carol Oates (Fourth Estate, paperback edition, 303)

I had no idea then how boys wooed girls. I guessed it was a matter of joshing and shared nothings and hours of scuffing through autumn leaves and even more hours of clenches during the slow numbers at the sock hop. - Edmund White, My Women https://archive.is/20121204150452/www.newyorker.com/fact/content/articles/050613fa_fact

French surrealism, German depressionism, everything that is modern, or at least recent, is here.

Mrs. Brown withdrawn, Phoebe came presently to bed to me, and what with the answers she drew from me, what with her own method of palpably satisfying herself