Is there nowhere in an American house where one may be by one's self?

Some things are best mended by a break.

There was no use in trying to emancipate a wife who had not the dimmest notion that she was not free.

There is one friend in the life of each of us who seems not a separate person, however dear and beloved, but an expansion, an interpretation, of one's self, the very meaning of one's soul.

And I wonder, among all the tangles of this mortal coil, which one contains tighter knots to undo, & consequently suggests more tugging, & pain, & diversified elements of misery, than the marriage tie.

...and wondering where he had read that clever liars give details, but that the cleverest do not.

In our hurried world too little value is attached to the part of the connoisseur and dilettante.