The future may be an enemy. Time can turn happy days and nights into nothing.

Making a living is nothing; the great difficulty is making a point, making a difference-with words.

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

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

The language of the younger generation has the brutality of the city and an assertion of threatening power at hand, not to come. It is military, theatrical, and at its most coherent probably a lasting repudiation of empty courtesy and bureaucratic euphemism.

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.

Books give not wisdom where none was before. But where some is, there reading makes it more.