Ah, good conversation - there's nothing like it, is there? The air of ideas is the only air worth breathing.

Don't they always go from bad to worse? There's no turning back--your old self rejects you, and shuts you out. ~Lilly Bart

It is almost as stupid to let your clothes betray that you know you are ugly as to have them proclaim that you think you are beautiful.

Our blindest impulses become evidence of perspicacity when they fall in with the course of events.

The real loneliness is living among all these kind people who only ask one to pretend!

If I could have made the change sooner I daresay I should never have given a thought to the literary delights of Paris or London; for life in the country is the only state which has always completely satisfied me, and I had never been allowed to gratify it, even for a few weeks at a time. Now I was to know the joys of six or seven months a year among fields and woods of my own, and the childish ecstasy of that first spring outing at Mamaroneck swept away all restlessness in the deep joy of communion with the earth.

She was not accustomed to taste the joys of solitude except in company.