There is, after all, no pleasure like that given by a woman who really wants to see you.

On the stage . . . masks are assumed with some regard to procedure; in everyday life, the participants act their parts without consideration either for suitability of scene or for the words spoken by the rest of the cast: the result is a general tendency for things to be brought to the level of farce even when the theme is serious enough.

For reasons not always at the time explicable, there are specific occasions when events begin suddenly to take on a significance previously unsuspected, so that, before we really know where we are, life seems to have begun in earnest at last, and we ourselves, scarcely aware that any change has taken place, are careering uncontrollably down the slippery avenues of eternity.

There is, after all, no pleasure like that given by a woman who really wants to see you.

One of the worst things about life is not how nasty the nasty people are. You know that already. It is how nasty the nice people can be.

One passes through the world knowing few, if any, of the important things about even the people with whom one has been from time to time in the closest intimacy.

Self-pity is essentially humorless, devoid of that lightness of touch which gives understanding of life.