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

...I have always lived on contrasts! To me the only death is monotony. Beware of monotony; it's the mother of all the deadly sins.

A New York divorce is in itself a diploma of virtue.

The desire for symmetry, for balance, for rhythm in form as well as in sound, is one of the most inveterate of human instincts.

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.

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.

Her mind was an hotel where facts came and went like transient lodgers, without leaving their address behind, and frequently without paying for their board.