[On sociability in Italy:] You may be a hermit or an innkeeper.

Here in the city the worst thing that can happen to a nation has happened: we are a people afraid of its youth.

When you travel your first discovery is that you do not exist.

Mothers born on relief have their babies on relief. Nothingness, truly, seems to be the condition of these New York people. They are nomads going from one rooming house to another, looking for a toilet that functions.

Gossip, or, as we gossips like to say, character analysis.

They had created themselves together, and they always saw themselves, their youth, their love, their lost youth and lost love, their failures and memories, as a sort of living fiction.

Harvard (across the river in Cambridge) and Boston are two ends of one mustache. ... Without the faculty, the visitors, the events that Harvard brings to the life here, Boston would be intolerable to anyone except genealogists, antique dealers, and those who find repletion in a closed local society.