The best that an individual can do is to concentrate on what he or she can do, in the course of a burning effort to do it better.

I suspect victims; they win in the long run.

somehow at parties at which one stays standing up one seems to require to be more concentratedly intelligent than one does at those at which one can sit down.

The novelist's--any writer's--object is to whittle down his meaning to the exactest and finest possible point. What, of course, isfatal is when he does not know what he does mean: he has no point to sharpen.

What I have found is, anything one keeps hidden should now and then be hidden somewhere else.

A Bowen, in the first place, made Bowen's Court. Since then, with a rather alarming sureness, Bowen's Court has made all the succeeding Bowens.

in my experience one thing you don't learn from is anything anyone set up to be a lesson; what you are to know you pick up as you go along.