Listen, Harriet. I do unterstand. I know you don't want either to give or to take ... You don't want ever again to have to depend for happiness on another person." "That's true. That's the truest thing you ever said." "All right. I can respect that. Only you've got to play the game. Don't force an emotional situation and then blame me for it." "But I don't want any situation. I want to be left in peace.

To make a precise scientific description of reality out of words is like trying to build a rigid structure out of pure quicksilver.

And then, at night, the lit lamp and the drawn curtain, with the flutter of the turned page and soft scrape of pen on paper the only sounds to break the silence between quarter- and quarter-chime.

A woman fit to be a man's wife is too good to be his servant.

She always says, my lord, that facts are like cows. If you look them in the face hard enough they generally run away.

Man is never truly himself except when he is actively creating something.

A person who tells a secret, swearing the recipient to secrecy in turn, is asking of the other person a discretion which he is abrogating himself.