You thought I was a lovelorn mistress; and I was only an expensive prostitute.

There was no use in trying to emancipate a wife who had not the dimmest notion that she was not free.

There is too much sour grapes for my taste in the present American attitude. The time to denounce the bankers was when we were all feeding off their gold plate; not now! At present they have not only my sympathy but my preference. They are the last representatives of our native industries.

I believe I know the only cure, which is to make one’s center of life inside of one’s self, not selfishly or excludingly, but with a kind of unassailable serenity—to decorate one’s inner house so richly that one is content there, glad to welcome anyone who wants to come and stay, but happy all the same when one is inevitably alone.

Everything may be labelled- but everybody is not.

But after a moment a sense of waste and ruin overcame him. There they were, close together and safe and shut in; yet so chained to their separate destinies that they might as well been half the world apart.

The desire for symmetry, for balance, for rhythm in form as well as in sound, is one of the most inveterate of human instincts.