To your generation, I must represent the literary equivalent of tufted furniture and gas chandeliers.

I can't love you unless I give you up.

Life is made up of compromises.

Half the trouble in life is caused by pretending there isn't any.

Leisure, itself the creation of wealth, is incessantly engaged in transmuting wealth into beauty by secreting the surplus energy which flowers in great architecture, great painting and great literature. Only in the atmosphere thus engendered floats that impalpable dust of ideas which is the real culture. A colony of ants or bees will never create a Parthenon.

And he felt himself oppressed by this creation of factitious purity, so cunningly manufactured by a conspiracy of mothers and aunts and grandmothers and long-dead ancestresses, because it was supposed to be what he wanted, what he had a right to, in order that he might exercise his lordly pleasure in smashing it like an image made of snow.

Nothing is more perplexing to a man than the mental process of a woman who reasons her emotions.