I haven't much opinion of words. They're apt to set fire to a dry tongue, that's what I say.

Surely one of the peculiar habits of circumstances is the way they follow, in their eternal recurrence, a single course. If an event happens once in a life, it may be depended upon to repeat later its general design.

What I hated even more than the conflict was the lurid spectacle of a world of unreason.

It would appear, from the best examples, that the proper way of beginning a preface to one's work is with a humble apology for having written at all.

Tilling the fertile soil of man's vanity.

... in the nineteen-thirties ... the most casual reader of murder mysteries could infallibly detect the villain, as soon as there entered a character who had recently washed his neck and did not commit mayhem on the English language.

Dignity is an anachronism.