gossip ... is only fiction produced by non-professionals.

You think religion is what's inside a little building filled with pretty lights from stained glass windows. But it's not. It's wings! Wings!

Professional psychologists seem to think that they are the only people who make sense out of human actions. The rest of us know that everybody tries to do just this. What else is gossip?

it was always insolent for a common man to take a chair in the presence of a lady - the word LADY, we may be sure, capitalized in her mind, and denoting not sex but rank.

It is not good for all our wishes to be filled; through sickness we recognize the value of health; through evil, the value of good; through hunger, the value of food; through exertion, the value of rest.

The richness and endless variety of human relationships ... that's what authors, even the finest and greatest, only succeed in hinting at. It's a hopeless business, like trying to dip up the ocean with a tea-spoon.

There is no human relationship more intimate than that of nurse and patient, one in which the essentials of character are more rawly revealed.