It's just because I love the past that I want this house to look back on its glamourous moment of youth and beauty, and I want its stairs to creak as if to the footsteps of women with hoop skirts and men in boots and spurs. But they've made it into a blondined, rouged-up old woman of sixty.

Think how you love me,' she whispered. 'I don't ask you to love me always like this, but I ask you to remember.' You'll always be like this to me.' Oh no; but promise me you'll remember.' Her tears were falling. 'I'll be different, but somewhere lost inside me there'll always be the person I am tonight.

Intelligence is a mere instrument of circumstances.

Travel, which had once charmed him, seemed, at length, unendurable, a business of color without substance, a phantom chase after his own dream's shadow.

I am too much a moralist at heart, and really want to preach at people in some acceptable form, rather than entertain them.

I was within and without. Simultaneously enchanted and repelled by the inexhaustible variety of life.

sometimes i wish i'd been an englishman; american life is so damned dumb and stupid and healthy