I'm afraid I'm an incorrigible life-lover, life-wonderer, and adventurer.

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.

When people ask for time, it's always for time to say no. Yes has one more letter in it, but it doesn't take half as long to say.

No insect hangs its nest on threads as frail as those which will sustain the weight of human vanity.

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.

Mothers and daughters are part of each other's consciousness, in different degrees and in a different way, but still with the mutual sense of something which has always been there. A real mother is just a habit of thought to her children.

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