There is too much sour grapes for my taste in the present American attitude. The time to denounce the bankers was when we were all feeding off their gold plate; not now! At present they have not only my sympathy but my preference. They are the last representatives of our native industries.

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

The air of ideas is the only air worth breathing.

When a man says he doesn't understand a woman it's because he won't take the trouble.

The immense accretion of flesh which had descended on her in middle life like a flood of lava on a doomed city had changed her from a plump active little woman with a neatly-turned foot and ankle into something as vast and august as a natural phenomenon. She had accepted this submergence as philosohpically as all her other trials, and now, in extreme old age, was rewarded by presenting to her mirror an almost unwrinkled expanse of firm pink and white flesh, in the centre of which the traces of a small face survived as if awaiting excavation.

I was never allowed to read the popular American children's books of my day because, as my mother said, the children spoke bad English without the author's knowing it.

Happiness is a work of art. Handle with care.