Anthologists are lazy fellows who like to spend a quiet evening at home raiding good books.

There's life for you. Spend the best years of your life studying penmanship and rhetoric and syntax and Beowulf and George Eliot, and then somebody steals your pencil.

I had been fed, in my youth, a lot of old wives' tales about the way men would instantly forsake a beautiful woman to flock around a brilliant one. It is but fair to say that, after getting out in the world, I had never seen this happen." [From a column dated November 17, 1928]

A hangover is the wrath of grapes.

[At the reception following her remarriage to Alan Campbell:] People who haven't talked to each other in years are on speaking terms again today - including the bride and groom.

Gratitude - the meanest and most snivelling attribute in the world.

The nowadays ruling that no word is unprintable has, I think, done nothing whatever for beautiful letters. The boys have gone hog-wild with liberty, yet the short flat terms used over and over, both in dialogue and narrative, add neither vigor nor clarity; the effect is not of shock but of something far more dangerous — tedium.