The American landscape has no foreground and the American mind no background.

Misfortune had made Lily supple instead of hardening her, and a pliable substance is less easy to break than a stiff one.

My last page is always latent in my first; but the intervening windings of the way become clear only as I write.

It is almost as stupid to let your clothes betray that you know you are ugly as to have them proclaim that you think you are beautiful.

I despair of the Republic! Such dreariness, such whining sallow women, such utter absence of the amenities, such crass food, crass manners, crass landscape!! What a horror it is for a whole nation to be developing without the sense of beauty, and eating bananas for breakfast.

I am secretly afraid of animals.... I think it is because of the usness in their eyes, with the underlying not-usness which beliesit, and is so tragic a reminder of the lost age when we human beings branched off and left them: left them to eternal inarticulateness and slavery. Why? their eyes seem to ask us.

You thought I was a lovelorn mistress; and I was only an expensive prostitute.