There are compensations for growing older. One is the realization that to be sporting isn't at all necessary. It is a great relief to reach this stage of wisdom.

That amenity which the French have developed into a great art . . . conversation.

It's not that I don't want to be a beauty, that I don't yearn to be dripping with glamour. It's just that I can't see how any woman can find time to do to herself all the things that must apparently be done to make herself beautiful and, having once done them, how anyone without the strength of mind of a foreign missionary can keep up such a regime.

The French have no such expression as 'killing time.' In their more philosophical vocabulary the term is 'passing time,' which means savoring all moments of it each to his individual enjoyment. While we battle with time, they relax with tempo.

Tragedy can break the heart but not the dam of the tearducts while schmaltz can dissolve the most hardened sophisticate.

That food has always been, and will continue to be, the basis for one of our greater snobbism does not explain the fact that the attitude toward the food choice of others is becoming more and more heatedly exclusive until it may well turn into one of those forms of bigotry against which gallant little committees are constantly planning campaigns in the cause of justice and decency.

Emily and I have now reached the time in life when not only do we lie about our ages, we forget what we've said they are.