As the pain that can be told is but half a pain, so the pity that questions has little healing in its touch.

Our blindest impulses become evidence of perspicacity when they fall in with the course of events.

What is one's personality, detached from that of the friends with whom fate happens to have linked one? I cannot think of myself apart from the influence of the two or three greatest friendships of my life, and any account of my own growth must be that of their stimulating and enlightening influence.

The American landscape has no foreground and the American mind no background.

Silence may be as variously shaded as speech.

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.

We shall hurt others less. Isn't it, after all, what you always wanted?