Why do long marriages occasionally endow their inhabitants with a rare kind of equilibrium otherwise almost unknown in human relations? My guess is that the value of the moment has at last overshadowed the long history of resentments, betrayals, and boredom.

Whether deliberately, unconsciously or accidentally, she seems to have composed her own life so that its fitful, rudderless, and self-doubting first half was alchemized into gold when the austere bluestocking became the fallen woman.

It's hard to be happy, and safe, and applauded in a miserable world.

Once you are thought selfish, not only are you forgiven a life designed mainly to suit yourself, which in anyone else would appear monstrous, but if an impulse to generosity should by chance overpower you, you will get five times the credit of some poor selfless soul who has been oozing kindness for years.

Today's shocks are tomorrow's conventions.

Androgyny suggests a spirit of reconciliation between the sexes; it suggests, further, a full range of experience…it suggests a spectrum upon which human beings choose their places without regard to propriety or custom.

Shifting problems is the first rule for a long and pleasant life.