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

... even in houses commonly held to be 'booky' one finds, nine times out of ten, not a library but a book-dump.

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

Old age, calm, expanded, broad with the haughty breadth of the universe, old age flowing free with the delicious near-by freedom of death.

She felt a stealing sense of fatigue as she walked; the sparkle had died out of her, and the taste of life was stale on her lips. She hardly knew what she had been seeking, or why the failure to find it had so blotted the light from her sky: she was only aware of a vague sense of failure, of an inner isolation deeper than the loneliness about her.

It seems stupid to have discovered America only to make it into a copy of another country.

There are moments when a man's imagination, so easily subdued to what it lives in, suddenly rises above its daily level and surveys the long windings of destiny.