No, it is not only our fate but our business to lose innocence, and once we have lost that, it is futile to attempt a picnic in Eden.

Good general-purpose manners nowadays may be said to consist in knowing how much you can get away with.

That is partly why women marry - to keep up the fiction of being in the hub of things.

Have not all poetic truths been already stated? The essence of a poetic truth is that no statement of it can be final.

Illusions are art, for the feeling person, and it is by art that we live, if we do.

Disappointment tears the bearable film off life.

Imagination of my kind is most caught, most fired, most worked upon by the unfamiliar: I have thrivenon the changes and chances, the dislocations andcontrasts which have made up so much of my life.