The very good people didn't convince me; I felt they'd never been tempted. But you knew; you understood; you had felt the world outside tugging at one with all its golden hands — and yet you hated the things it asks of one; you hated happiness bought by disloyalty and cruelty and indifference.

... naturalness is not always consonant with taste.

Beauty (was)a gift which, in the eyes of New York, justified every success, and excused a certain number of failings.

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

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

Who's 'they'? Why don't you all get together and be 'they' yourselves?

In every heart there should be one grief that is like a well in the desert.