Something he knew he had missed: the flower of life. But he thought of it now as a thing so unattainable and improbable that to have repined would have been like despairing because one had not drawn the first prize in a lottery.

There's nothing grimmer than the tragedy that wears a comic mask.

When people ask for time, it's always for time to say no. Yes has one more letter in it, but it doesn't take half as long to say.

[B]ut he had lived in a world in which, as he said, no one who loved ideas need hunger mentally.

The only way not to think about money is to have a great deal of it.

Once more it was borne in on him that marriage was not the safe anchorage he had been taught to think, but a voyage on uncharted seas.

No insect hangs its nest on threads as frail as those which will sustain the weight of human vanity.