My first few weeks in America are always miserable, because the tastes I am cursed with are all of a kind that cannot be gratified here, and I am not enough in sympathy with our gross public to make up for the lack on the aesthetic side. One's friends are delightful; but we are none of us Americans, we don't think or feel as the Americans do, we are the wretched exotics produced in a European glass-house, the most displaced and useless class on earth!

Life is the only real counselor; wisdom unfiltered through personal experience does not become a part of the moral tissue.

... there are spines to which the immobility of worship is not a strain.

As he paid the hansom and followed his wife's long train into the house he took refuge in the comforting platitude that the first six months were always the most difficult in marriage. 'After that I suppose we shall have pretty nearly finished rubbing off each other’s angles,' he reflected; but the worst of it was that May's pressure was already bearing on the very angles whose sharpness he most wanted to keep

I had the story, bit by bit, from various people, and, as generally happens in such cases, each time it was a different story.

Her failure was a useful preliminary to success.

Set wide the window. Let me drink the day.