I was haunted always by my other life-my drab room in the Bronx, my square foot of the subway, my fixation upon the day's letter from Alabama-would it come and what would it say?-my shabby suits, my poverty, and love. While my friends were launching decently into life I had muscled my inadequate bark into midstream... I was a failure-mediocre at advertising work and unable to get started as a writer. Hating the city, I got roaring, weeping drunk on my last penny and went home.

It takes a genius to whine appealingly.

But he hated to be sober. It made him conscious of the people around him, of that air of struggle, of greedy ambition, of hope more sordid than despair, of incessant passage up or down.

Very strong personalities must confine themselves in mutual conversation to very gentle subjects.

I never noticed the stars before. I always thought of them as great big diamonds that belonged to some one. Now they frighten me. They make me feel that it was all a dream, all my youth.

Young people do not perceive at once that the giver of wounds is the enemy and the quoted tattle merely the arrow.

It is not necessarily poverty of spirit that makes a woman surround herself with life - it can be a superabundance of interest.