[I]t's safer to be fond of dangerous people.

She wondered if, when human souls try to get too near each other, they do not inevitably become mere blurs to each other's vision.

...It was one of the great livery-stableman's most masterly intuitions to have discovered that Americans want to get away from amusement even more quickly than they want to get to it.

I discovered early that crying makes my nose red, and the knowledge has helped me through several painful episodes.

He had married (as most young men did) because he had met a perfectly charming girl at the moment when a series of rather aimless sentimental adventures were ending in premature disgust; and she had represented peace, stability, comradeship, and the steadying sense of an unescapable duty.

She wanted, passionately and persistently, two things which she believed should subsist together in any well-ordered life: amusement and respectability.

He had her in his arms, her face like a wet flower at his lips, and all their vain terrors shriveling up like ghosts at sunrise.