The real alchemy consists in being able to turn gold back again into something else; and that's the secret that most of your friends have lost.

To visit Morocco is still like turning the pages of some illuminated Persian manuscript all embroidered with bright shapes and subtle lines.

I begin to see what marriage is for. It's to keep people away from each other. Sometimes I think that two people who love each other can be saved from madness only by the things that come between them - children, duties, visits, bores, relations - the things that protect married people from each other.

... caprice is as ruinous as routine.

Archer had always been inclined to think that chance and circumstance played a small part in shaping people's lots compared with their innate tendency to have things happen to them.

there are lots of ways of answering a letter - and writing doesn't happen to be mine.

Why do we call all our generous ideas illusions, and the mean ones truths?