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

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

It's you who are telling me; opening my eyes to things I'd looked at so long that I'd ceased to see them.

How much longer are we going to think it necessary to be American before (or in contradistinction to) being cultivated, being enlightened, being humane, and having the same intellectual discipline as other civilized countries?

She was very near hating him now; yet the sound of his voice, the way the light fell on his thin, dark hair, the way he sat and moved and wore his clothes—she was conscious that even these trivial things were inwoven with her deepest life.

The worst of doing one's duty was that it apparently unfitted one for doing anything else.

Charity, till then, had been conscious only of a vague self-disgust and a frightening physical distress; now, of a sudden, there came to her the grave surprise of motherhood.