For in that city [New York] there is neurosis in the air which the inhabitants mistake for energy.

He had no strength for any other war than his own solitary struggle to keep alive.

Beavers bred in captivity, inhabiting a concrete pool, will, if given the timber, fatuously go through all the motions of damming an ancestral stream.

You never find an Englishman among the under-dogs except in England, of course.

That was the change in her from ten years ago; that, indeed, was her reward, this haunting, magical sadness which spoke straight to the heart and struck silence; it was the completion of her beauty.

Never get mixed up in a Welsh wrangle. It doesn't end in blows like an Irish one, but goes on forever.

Perhaps all our loves are merely hints and symbols; vagabond-language scrawled on gate-posts and paving-stones along the weary road that others have tramped before us; perhaps you and I are types and this sadness which sometimes falls between us springs from disappointment in our search, each straining through and beyond the other, snatching a glimpse now and then of the shadow which turns the corner always a pace or two ahead of us.