sanity, in my opinion, is an achievement. I have seen very few well-balanced people in my life who were not dunces.

There is something in the quality of the French mind to which I have always felt a reluctant kinship. They are the only people I know who can leap into an enormous vocabulary of words and beat them up with the wings of their spirit into a fine hysterical eloquence.

sanity, in my opinion, is an achievement. I have seen very few well-balanced people in my life who were not dunces.

Nothing fans me into such a state of peaceful mental somnambulance as the intellectual antics of a person who displays his learning, not from vanity always, but frequently because it is all he has got; no real sense, no wisdom of his own, merely much good stuff he has learned from other sources. He spreads it like a garment as any other decent person would to hide the thinness of his shanks.

I love truth, although I shall die hating mere facts, because they are misleading.

I was not too stupid to learn, but too smart. Some instinct must have warned me that a woman accomplished in the domestic arts is frequently enslaved by them.

Mere words will not do. They must convey the color, charm, and pulse of life. They must have a private twinkle of wit in them that makes a good-natured noise like laughter through the keyhole of the reader's mind.