Being in a hurry seems so fiercely important when you yourself are the hurrier and so comically ludicrous when it is someone else.

Truth and Beauty (perhaps Keats was wrong in identifying them: perhaps they have the relation of Wit and Humour, or Rain and Rainbow) are of interest only to hungry people. There are several kinds of hunger. If Socrates, Spinoza, and Santayana had had free access to a midnight icebox we would never have heard of them. Shall I be ashamed of my little mewing truths?... I ask to be forgiven: they are such tiny ones.

New York, the nation's thyroid gland.

How womanly it is to ask the unanswerable at the moment impossible.

New York is Babylon : Brooklyn is the truly Holy City. New York is the city of envy, office work, and hustle; Brooklyn is the region of homes and happiness.... There is no hope for New Yorkers, for their glory in Their skyscraping sins; but in Brooklyn there is the wisdom of the lowly.

Animal crackers, and cocoa to drink That is the finest of suppers, I think When I'm grown up and can have what I please, I think I shall always insist upon these.

America is still a government of the naive, for the naive, and by the naive. He who does not know this, nor relish it, has no inkling of the nature of his country.