The least practical of us have some petty thrift dear to our hearts, some one direction in which we love to scrimp.

Bargaining is essential to the life of the world; but nobody has ever claimed that it is an ennobling process.

It is not the office of a novelist to show us how to behave ourselves; it is not the business of fiction to teach us anything.

I wonder what especial sanctity attaches itself to fifteen minutes. It is always the maximum and the minimum of time which will enable us to acquire languages, etiquette, personality, oratory ... One gathers that twelve minutes a day would be hopelessly inadequate, and twenty minutes a wasteful and ridiculous excess.

The pitfall of the feminist is the belief that the interests of men and women can ever be severed; that what brings sufferings to the one can leave the other unscathed.

real letter-writing ... is founded on a need as old and as young as humanity itself, the need that one human being has of another.

When the contemplative mind is a French mind, it is content, for the most part, to contemplate France. When the contemplative mind is an English mind, it is liable to be seized at any moment by an importunate desire to contemplate Morocco or Labrador.