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.

I was just a screw or cog in the great machine I called life, and when I dropped out of it I found I was of no use anywhere else.

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.

The air of ideas is the only air worth breathing.

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.

Think what stupid things the people must have done with their money who say they're 'happier without'.

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