One drop of hatred in your soul will spread and discolor everything like a drop of black ink in white milk.

I can't play bridge. I don't play tennis. All those things that people learn, and I admire, there hasn't seemed time for. But what there is time for is looking out the window.

A story ... has a sturdy sense of itself of being built out of its own necessity, not just to shelter or beguile you.

There was a danger whenever I was on home ground. It was the danger of seeing my life through other eyes than my own. Seeing it as an ever-increasing roll of words like barbed wire, intricate, bewildering, uncomforting—set against the rich productions, the food, flowers, and knitted garments, of other women’s domesticity. It became harder to say that it was worth the trouble.

As soon as a man and woman of almost any age are alone together within four walls it is assumed that anything may happen. Spontaneous combustion, instant fornication, triumph of the senses. What possibilities men and women must see in each other to infer such dangers. Or, believing in the dangers, how often they must think about the possibilities.

He never wanted to be away from her. She had the spark of life.

Now i no longer believe that people's secrets are defined and communicable, or their feelings full-blown and easy to recognize.