I was a failure in Boston...because they thought I was too fashionable to be intelligent, and a failure in New York because they were afraid I was too intelligent to be fashionable.

The worst of doing one's duty was that it apparently unfitted one for doing anything else.

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.

Something he knew he had missed: the flower of life. But he thought of it now as a thing so unattainable and improbable that to have repined would have been like despairing because one had not drawn the first prize in a lottery.

...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 last page is always latent in my first; but the intervening windings of the way become clear only as I write.

Most timidities have such secret compensations and Miss Bart was discerning enough to know that the inner vanity is generally in proportion to the outer self depreciation.