Not one word was left out

"The book is long, all right," grinned Harrison Leussler, the publisher's Western representative. He flew from Palm Springs, Cal., to attend a cocktail party for Miss Kennelly at the Multnomah hotel. He recounted how Houghton Mifflin Co. had received a note from an unknown author out in Portland saying:
     "I've written a book, my first. If you are not interested, please wrap it up and send it back."
     "In a few days, along came 1000 sheets of closely typewritten copy," Leussler continued. "It was enough to floor a first reader, particularly when the author was unknown."
     But the first reader read it line by line--all of it. So did the other five readers, then the editor and finally the editor-in-chief "who lost no time in writing a contract."
     "The book would have ordinarily taken 660 pages, but by lengthening lines and crowding margins a little, it was published in 375," said Leussler. "Not one word of the manuscript was changed or left out."
     --"First Novel of Portland Author, 'Peaceful [sic] Kingdom', Blunt, Lively," in the Oregon Journal, November 11, 1949, page 1

Lies and truths

Lies tell truths that are astonishing sometimes.
     --From Variation West

Enlarging your horizon

You could develop a taste for enlarging your horizon, that obligation more important than any other.
     --From Variation West

The hairdresser can tell you

There are few concepts so difficult that they do not yield to the repeated attack of the ordinary mind, and after dealing with all the basics over and over, love, death, money, and simple bits of local confusion, the hairdresser can tell you as well as any menticultured abstractionist that an inch is enough to keep us from drowning, that solutions are always partial and always subject to expiration, either short-term or long-term, and that . . . oh, yes, you could go farther and fare worse.
     --From Variation West

Courts gone to hell

The courts in Utah, for instance. Once high-class tribunals, where Gentiles (few and far between) were barred from jury duty and every Judge stood high up in the Mormon church, had as the years passed plummeted to hell. On the bench and in the jury box now sat formless voids of primordial matter, Democrats, Catholics, wild-haired atheists, Trade Unionists, Masons. A man hadn’t a chance. “Two years’ hard labor, step down”—bang! with the gavel. Chains, the iron ball, convict stripes even on your hat. No appeal either! to anyone, even in a case where the excess “wife” in evidence was not the defendant’s wife at all but only the hired girl to a wife. So that just goes to show the rottenness.
     --From Variation West

Not till the job is done

The artist who is going to do something spins out of his own mind a cocoon, he goes mentally into it, he seals it up and never comes out till the job is done.
     --From Variation West, paraphrasing Walter Prescott Webb

Early death

And that was one thing you could say for early death. It put off for the failer of full performance a date of grief forever.
     --From Variation West