“Creatures of hope”

From J. L. Carr’s 1980 novella A Month in the Country :

By nature we are creatures of hope, always ready to be deceived again, caught by the marvel that might be wrapped in the grubbiest brown paper parcel.

The novella has been reissued by New York Review Books (2000).

Other NYRB finds of my acquaintance: William Lindsay Gresham’s Nightmare Alley, Georg Christoph Lichtenberg’s The Waste Books, James Schuyler’s Alfred and Guinevere. I’m not sure it’s possible to go wrong looking for NYRB spines in a bookstore.