Her vivid smile was like a light held up to dazzle me.

I was a failure in Boston...because they thought I was too fashionable to be intelligent, and a failure in New York because they were afraid I was too intelligent to be fashionable.

Society soon grows used to any state of things which is imposed upon it without explanation.

I begin to see what marriage is for. It's to keep people away from each other. Sometimes I think that two people who love each other can be saved from madness only by the things that come between them - children, duties, visits, bores, relations - the things that protect married people from each other.

Beauty (was)a gift which, in the eyes of New York, justified every success, and excused a certain number of failings.

We ought to be opening a bottle of wine!

Mrs. Ballinger is one of the ladies who pursue Culture in bands, as though it were dangerous to meet it alone.