Little as she was addicted to solitude, there had come to be moments when it seemed a welcome escape from the empty noises of her life.

Since the Americans have ceased to have dyspepsia, they have lost the only thing that gave them any expression.

Ah, good conversation - there's nothing like it, is there? The air of ideas is the only air worth breathing.

It was the old New York way...the way people who dreaded scandal more than disease, who placed decency above courage, and who considered that nothing was more ill-bred than "scenes", except those who gave rise to them.

...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.

My first few weeks in America are always miserable, because the tastes I am cursed with are all of a kind that cannot be gratified here, and I am not enough in sympathy with our gross public to make up for the lack on the aesthetic side. One's friends are delightful; but we are none of us Americans, we don't think or feel as the Americans do, we are the wretched exotics produced in a European glass-house, the most displaced and useless class on earth!

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